Introduction

This is a book on René Descartes’s method in his most famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy. Although we briefly discuss his celebrated “method of doubt”, our attention centers on the method championed in the Discourse on Method. Of specific concern is the method of analysis to which Descartes alludes in the Second and Sixth Replies (AT 7: 155-7, 4245, 444-7; CSM 2: 110-12, 286-7, 299-301) and which he describes as the fifth way of reaching wisdom – the search for first causes – in the Preface to the French edition of the Principles (AT 9B: 5, CSM 1: 181). Once one understands that method, the argumentative structure of the Meditations should appear far clearer and much less eclectic than it would be otherwise.