ABSTRACT
Meditation I is dedicated to the ‘overthrow’ of present opinions. The first sentence of the Meditation introduces this project as a necessary condition of establishing ‘something firm and lasting in the sciences’—and seems to offer an explanation of why it is necessary:
It has already been some years since I noticed how many false things I accepted as true when I was young, and how doubtful is whatever I erected afterwards on these, and thus that once in my life everything ought to be overturned completely, and begun again from the first foundations, if I desire to establish anything firm and enduring [firmum et mansurum] in the sciences…. (AT VII, 17; HR I, 144)
This enterprise, Descartes continues, had seemed to him ‘enormous’; but circumstances of leisure and comfort, together with increased maturity, now make the time opportune to ‘apply’ himself ‘seriously and freely to the general overthrow of my present opinions.’ To do this, he says, it will be sufficient to find in them ‘any reason for doubt,’ since ‘reason already persuades me, that assent should be withheld from those that are not completely certain and indubitable, no less carefully than from those that are obviously false’ (AT VII, 18; HR I, 145). The foundations metaphor is carried on in the further remark that since ‘if the foundations are undermined, whatever is built on top of them automatically collapses,’ it is not necessary to consider our beliefs one by one, which would be ‘an infinite task.’ Rather, Descartes says, he will directly attack the principles on which all that he formerly believed is based: ‘aggrediar statim ipsa principia, quibus illud omne quod olim credidi nitebatur’ (ibid.).
