ABSTRACT

Descartes’s Meditations is a book designed to make you think. It is written in the first person in what seems to be an autobiography of six days’ thought. However, this is in fact a highly ingenious device for encouraging the reader to follow the twists of the argument. To read the book in the spirit in which it was written involves active engagement with its ideas, not just passive absorption. You are invited to become the ‘I’ in the text, moving through successive phases of doubt and enlightenment. As philosophical literature the Meditations remains unsurpassed and many of the ideas expressed in it have held sway over subsequent philosophers. Descartes is usually taken to be the father of modern philosophy.