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René Descartes wanted to be sure about what he knew, so he tried a bold experiment: doubt everything that could possibly be doubted. Sights can fool you, and dreams feel real, so what is left? One thing: the fact that he was thinking proved that he existed. I think, therefore I am. From that tiny firm spot, he rebuilt his ideas step by step. His book changed how people think about knowledge forever.
Descartes served briefly as a soldier, traveled through Europe, and settled in the Netherlands, where he could work in quiet for twenty years. Dissatisfied with what he had been taught, he resolved to reject every opinion that admitted the slightest doubt. In 1637 he published the Discourse in French, anonymously at first, as the preface to a volume of scientific essays.
The book is partly the story of his life and education, and partly a manual of method. Its four rules urge readers to accept nothing unclear, divide problems into parts, proceed from simple to complex, and review everything completely. Descartes then describes his famous doubt, his first certainty, and the provisional rules of conduct he adopted while rebuilding his beliefs.
Modern philosophy is often said to begin here, with the individual mind as the starting point of knowledge. The style is plain and personal, very unlike the dense Latin treatises Descartes opposed. Readers curious about how we know anything, or about science's demand for clear evidence, will find this short classic the perfect place to begin.
René Descartes, a French soldier turned philosopher living in the Netherlands, published the Discourse on the Method in 1637, written in French so that ordinary readers, not only scholars, could judge his ideas. It tells how he decided to doubt everything uncertain and rebuild knowledge from the one certainty he could not doubt: I think, therefore I am. The book offers the founding story of modern philosophy, told as an intellectual autobiography.
Descartes published the Discourse on the Method in 1637 as the introduction to three scientific works, and chose to write it in French so that readers of good sense, including those Latin never reached, could judge for themselves. Part memoir, part manifesto, it recounts how a brilliant, dissatisfied student of the Jesuits decided that everything he had been taught might be false, and what he did next.
It has lasted as the founding document of modern philosophy. The methodical doubt, the cogito, I think, therefore I am, and the program of clear and distinct ideas set the agenda that Locke, Hume, and Kant would spend two centuries answering. Its four rules of method also read as a charter for modern science: evidence, analysis, order, and completeness, stated in prose any educated reader could follow.
A first reader will be surprised by how short and readable it is, more like a reflective essay than a treatise. The scientific appendices, including the geometry that invented coordinate axes, are usually omitted and are not needed here. Read the first four parts closely. The rest of philosophy is, in large part, a reply.
Edition: Translated by John Veitch. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 59.
The first chapter
If this Discourse appear too long to be read at once, it may be divided into six Parts: and, in the first, will be found various considerations touching the Sciences; in the second, the principal rules of the Method which the Author has discovered, in the third, certain of the rules of Morals which he has deduced from this Method; in the fourth, the reasonings by which he establishes the existence of God and of the Human Soul, which are the foundations of his Metaphysic; in the fifth, the order of the Physical questions which he has investigated, and, in particular, the explication of the motion of the heart and of some other difficulties pertaining to Medicine, as also the difference between the soul of man and that of the brutes; and, in the last, what the Author believes to be required in order to greater advancement in the investigation of Nature than has yet been made, with the reasons that have induced him to write.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1637. Author died 1650. John Veitch translation. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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