ABSTRACT
Baruch Spinoza’s work bears the title, Parts I and II of Rene Descartes’ ‘Principles of Philosophy’, Demonstrated in the Geometric Manner. Descartes maintains that analysis is the true and best way of teaching, and that the Meditations have been demonstrated in the analytic way. Descartes thinks that the concepts which are important for philosophy are concepts which it would be difficult to define in a way which would be helpful to someone who does not already have the concept; and if he already has the concept, he will not require the definition. One very important advantage which the twentieth-century commentator has in dealing with a seventeenth-century figure like Descartes is that he is the heir of three hundred years of critical discussion of Descartes’s philosophy. It is true, as E. Gilson says, that Spinoza and other contemporary interpreters of Descartes had some advantages over their twentieth-century counterparts.
