Product Description

This authoritative translation by John Cottingham of the Meditations is taken from the much acclaimed three-volume Cambridge edition of the Philosophical Writings of Descartes. It is based on the best available texts and presents Descartes' central metaphysical writings in clear, readable modern English.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2343 in Books
• Published on: 1996-04-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 167 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, Latin (translation)
Original Language: Latin

About the Author

Michael Moriarty is Centenary Professor of French Literature and Thought, Queen Mary, University of London.

Customer Reviews

An excellent translation of Descartes' most famous book
This is the preferred choice of teachers and scholars seeking an English language translation of this central text of philosophy. Not only is the text extremely readable, this translation comes with an excellent introduction written by a highly regarded scholar in the field of Descartes scholarship. If you're looking for a first-rate translation of the Meditations (and a great introduction to the writings of one of the best philosophers of the early modern period), you can't go wrong with this choice. Although it is a little more expensive than some of the other available translations, I recommend it above all others.

Modern Philosophy Starts Here
Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy has had an incalculable influence on the history of subsequent philosophical thinking. Indeed, according to nearly every history of philosophy you're likely to come across, this work is where modern philosophy begins. It's not that any of Descartes's arguments are startlingly original--many of them have historical precedents--but that Descartes's work was compelling enough to initiate two research programs in philosophy, namely British empiricism and continental rationalism, and to place certain issues (e.g. the mind-body problem, the plausibility of and responses to skepticism, the ontological argument for the existence of God, etc.) on the philosophical agenda for a long time to come. Moreover, Descartes was capable of posing questions of great intrinsic interest in prose accessible to everyone. So the Meditations is a work of value to both newcomers to philosophy and to those with a great deal of philosophical background.

This is an excellent edition of the Meditations for students for a number of reasons. First, it's the same translation of the Meditations (and of the relevant passages from the Objections and Replies) that appears in the Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch three-volume edition of the philosophical works of Descartes, which is quickly gaining wide acceptance as the best edition of Descartes's work in English. Second, it includes a selection of important passages from the objections and replies to Descartes's Meditations. So this volume allows you to see some of the most serious objections to Descartes's work that were made by his contemporaries along with his responses to those objections. Finally, this edition includes some helpful introductory material. It includes two different introductions: one by Bernard Williams that focuses on Descartes's method and the most important lines of argument in the Meditations; the other by John Cottingham, the translator and editor of this edition, focusing on the place of the Meditations within Descartes's philosophical corpus.

That said, it's time to talk about the content of the Meditations. The first, and most famous, of the Meditations is Descartes's implementation of his method of doubt. Descartes's aim here is to systematically doubt everything he believes that seems dubitable in any way and thereby to arrive at something that is absolutely certain and indubitable. Whatever he can discover to be certain in this way, he thinks, will provide him with a firm foundation for the remainder of his knowledge. Here Descartes formulates two very famous skeptical arguments: the dreaming argument and the evil demon argument. The dreaming arguments calls into question my current beliefs about the world by drawing attention to the possibility that I might be dreaming now. Can I know right now that I'm not dreaming? If not, doesn't it seem that I don't know much of anything? The evil demon argument is even more radical in that it focuses my attention on the possibility that almost my entire conception of reality is based on a very general delusion. What if my every experience and all my reasoning results from constant deception by some being with God-like powers? What, if anything, would I know if this were the case? These worries, Descartes thinks, allow him to doubt nearly all his beliefs, and it indeed they may preclude his having any certain knowledge at all.

If these are real possibilities, how can he know anything? The rest of the Meditations is Descartes's attempt to answer this question. Famously, he begins by claiming that he can be certain of his own existence. Even if he is dreaming or being deceived by an all-powerful evil demon, he can be sure that he exists. For he couldn't dream or be deceived unless he existed. But even if he can be certain of his own existence, how can Descartes move beyond this to knowledge of a world outside his own mind?

Descartes thinks he can get outside his own mind by appealing to the existence of God. He provides two distinct proofs for the existence of God: one a variant of the ontological argument, which attempts to prove God's existence from an appeal to the content of the concept of God, and one a type of cosmological argument, which attempts to prove God's existence by appealing to a phenomenon whose only possible cause is God. Both these arguments, Descartes claims, prove that the world includes an absolutely perfect God. And it is the perfection of God along with God's role as his role as a creator that allows Descartes to be confident that he can know things beyond his own mind. For God, as a wholly perfect being, wouldn't provide Descartes with intellectual faculties that allow him to go wrong when he uses him as they were intended to be used. Consequently, Descartes can be sure that his beliefs are generally correct, provided that he has used his intellectual faculties in the way God intended. Thus, he can be sure that, in general, his views about the world around him are correct.

This work also includes a statement of the sort of mind-body dualism with which Descartes is widely associated. Although his arguments for dualism are obscure here, it is fairly easy to explain the central idea. According to Descartes, mind and body are wholly distinct kinds of substance that interact with one another. Mental states aren't a part of the natural world revealed by the sciences, and so, for instance, they are not reducible to certain things going on in a brain. Instead, they're a wholly different type of thing--though a type of thing that is somehow causally connected to a brain.

All of this is material, and a lot more, is covered in roughly sixty pages of text, and it is presented in some of the clearest, most straightforward philosophical prose ever written. Plus, the reader needn't have mastered any arcane jargon or previous work in philosophy to understand Descartes's views. And because it is written as a series of meditations in which Descartes leads us through something like his own process of through about these issues, it makes for relatively easy reading.

This is required reading for anyone interested in philosophy or its history, and honestly I don't see how this work can be ignored by anyone interested in the history of ideas. It's also a work that I'd recommend to anyone who wants to be introduced to philosophy by reading the work of a great philosopher.

Translation is good.
I leave it to the reader to determine the merits of Descartes' thinking; that this work is seminal is obvious and needs no exegesis (nor does explanation of the text do any good for those who have yet to read it). The Cambridge edition is in my opinion the best out there for the English speaking world. It is a clean, literal rendering that does a great job of capturing the Latinate sense of Descartes' terminology in English with minimal obfuscation.