ABSTRACT
Rene Descartes published Meditations on First Philosophy at what may be seen as the height of his career. Most importantly, Descartes preceded his Meditations with Discourse on the Method, a 1637 work that anyone wishing to thoroughly understand his thought should read alongside Meditations. Descartes's definition of matter as res extensa led him to reject the existence of a vacuum—a space without matter—as impossible. Meditations offers what Descartes saw as the foundation of all knowledge, and particularly of physics. Similarly, the mechanistic view of physics, called "mechanical philosophy", proposed that physics explained the mechanisms that lay beneath inanimate matter. The movement of material bodies can be explained in purely mechanical terms. By starting from such neutral ground in metaphysics and epistemology, Descartes hoped to convince those who might have felt provoked if he had expounded on his own views of natural philosophy.
