ABSTRACT
Why wax? In the Meditations, Descartes alone in his study, sitting by the
fire, wrapped in his cloak, resolves to make a clean sweep of all his old opinions-among them, the opinion that external objects are more real than consciousness itself. In order to examine this opinion, he needs a representative thing or body. He chooses wax. 1‘L et us consider…one particular body. Let us take, for example, this piece of wax’ (Descartes 1993b: 20). My question is, with a world of objects to choose from, why wax?’
