Philosophical Works

In the winter of 1619 a young soldier named René Descartes spent a day shut in a stove-heated room in Germany, thinking. By his own account he came out with a method: accept nothing as true that you do not clearly know to be true, divide each problem into parts, go from the simple to the complex, and check everything. This book holds his account of that day and what he built on it.

The Discourse on the Method appeared in 1637, without his name on it, and in French rather than Latin, so that anyone with good sense could follow. It was written as a preface to three scientific essays, one of which, the Geometry, introduced the coordinates that still carry his name. The Discourse is short and personal, part memoir and part manifesto. In Part Four comes the sentence everyone knows: I think, therefore I am.

The Meditations on First Philosophy, published in Latin in 1641, makes the same argument slowly and properly. Over six days Descartes doubts his senses, then his body, then even arithmetic, entertaining the idea of a malicious demon bent on deceiving him. What survives is the thinking self, and from there he tries to rebuild God, the world and the difference between mind and body. Readers have argued with that last step ever since, starting with the objections printed alongside the first edition.

John Veitch translated both works in the 1850s, and his versions remain among the clearest in English. Descartes wrote as he hoped to think, in order and without ornament, and Veitch keeps that.

Descartes liked to stay in bed until late morning. In 1649 Queen Christina of Sweden summoned him to Stockholm to teach her philosophy at five in the morning, and he was dead within five months. The book is 474 pages, the thickest on the list. Read it in bed. He would have.