ABSTRACT
In his 1641 work Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes poses central questions that continue to preoccupy philosophers to this day. A seminal text of modern philosophy, Meditations deals in particular with the disciplines of epistemology and metaphysics. Descartes wants this work to lay a foundation of certainty for all branches of knowledge. Rene Descartes lived and wrote during the "Early modern" age, roughly the early 1500s to the late 1700s, when the rise of modern science began to lead some to doubt the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church resisted new scientific discoveries, which would have shown ideas it, had traditionally clung to as false. Descartes saw Galileo condemned as a heretic when he challenged the Church's pre-modern scientific dogma by claiming that the earth moves. Among Descartes's contemporaries, some could afford to follow their intellectual pursuits as leisurely activities, outside the strict framework of scholastic universities or colleges.
