Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th Ed

This Hackett volume pairs René Descartes's two most widely read works. The Discourse on Method, published in French in 1637 so that ordinary readers rather than only scholars could follow it, is part intellectual autobiography and part manifesto. Across six parts Descartes describes abandoning the scholastic learning of his schooling, sets out four precepts for conducting reason well — accept only what is clearly and distinctly known, divide each difficulty into parts, proceed from the simple to the complex, and enumerate completely enough to omit nothing — and applies them to questions of morality, God, the soul, and the physical world. It is here, in Part IV, that "I think, therefore I am" first appears.

The Meditations on First Philosophy, published in Latin in 1641, is the more rigorous restatement of the same project, written as six days of first-person meditation that the reader is invited to undertake alongside the author. The First Meditation dismantles everything that can be doubted, including the evidence of the senses, by way of the dreaming argument and the hypothesis of an all-powerful deceiver. The Second recovers a single certainty — that whenever the mediator thinks, he exists — and, through the famous example of a piece of melting wax, argues that the intellect rather than the senses is what genuinely grasps a thing. The remaining meditations argue for the existence of God from the idea of perfection and from essence, explain human error as the misuse of free will, and conclude with the real distinction between the thinking mind and the extended body that became known as Cartesian dualism.

This fourth edition carries Donald A. Cress's completely revised translation of the Meditations, made from the corrected Latin text, together with further corrections to the Discourse — closer to Descartes's original while keeping the plain, teachable prose that made the volume a standard classroom text. The 1999 date on this record is the Hackett printing, not the works themselves.