ABSTRACT

Discovering a firm basis for his premises, or first principles, was especially important to our author. He believed that true principles, once discovered, would serve to guide further reasoning by the clarity of their own content. As modern readers looking back at Descartes’ work, we will want to understand how he endeavored to reveal such clarity to his audience. And we will sometimes reconstruct his reasoning in formally valid arguments as a way of understanding for ourselves how his principles were supposed to lead to further conclusions.