Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes, 1641)

Descartes' six meditations, in John Veitch's English translation (first published 1853; the Wikisource text is the 1901 reprint), public domain. T1 — the primary text. The spoke's second primary philosophical work, after critique-of-pure-reason, and the first for a thinker in its own founding corpus.

Read here: the Letter of Dedication, the Preface, the Synopsis, and Meditations I and II in full. Meditations III–VI (the proofs of God and of body, and the real distinction) are not read yet and nothing on this page rests on them.

The doubt is a demolition, and it is deliberate

Meditation I does not argue that the senses are unreliable in general. It applies a rule about foundations:

"as the removal from below of the foundation necessarily involves the downfall of the whole edifice, I will at once approach the criticism of the principles on which all my former beliefs rested."

The senses go first, and on a prudential rule rather than a sceptical one — "I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us; and it is the part of prudence not to place absolute confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived." Then dreaming, which he takes further than the paraphrases usually do: not I might be dreaming now but that no test exists —

"I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished."

And then the demon, introduced as a supposition he adopts on purpose, in the sentence right after he says why he is allowed to: "the end I now seek is not action but knowledge."

"I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me."

The cogito is not in this book

The spoke's rene-descartes page attributes cogito, ergo sum to "the Meditations and the Discourse." The Meditations has no such sentence. The words "cogito," "therefore I am" and any equivalent inference appear nowhere in Meditations I or II. What is there is a different kind of claim:

"it must, in fine, be maintained, all things being maturely and carefully considered, that this proposition (pronunciatum) I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind." (Meditation II, §3)

Not I think, so I exist — a proposition whose truth is guaranteed on each occasion of its being uttered or thought, and only then. Descartes makes the temporal restriction explicit two paragraphs later, and it is the part a slogan cannot carry:

"I am—I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same time altogether cease to be."

So the famous inference belongs to the Discourse on the Method (1637) and the Principles (1644). Reading the Meditations for it turns up an occasion-bound certainty instead of a syllogism — which is the difference between a first premise and a foothold, and it changes what the argument to dualism is standing on. Recorded as a correction to this wiki, not to Descartes; both readings are kept and the tension is flagged in synthesis.

What the thinking thing is

The definition is a list, and its breadth is the surprise — willing and refusing are in it, so the thinking thing is not a pure intellect:

"But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and perceives." (§8)

"I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thinking thing, that is, a mind (mens sive animus), understanding, or reason, terms whose signification was before unknown to me." (§6)

The wax, and what it is an argument for

The wax passage is usually reported as an argument about substance. In the text it closes on epistemology: the piece of wax loses every sensible property to the fire and "the same wax remains," so what grasps it is not sense or imagination —

"bodies themselves are not properly perceived by the senses nor by the faculty of imagination, but by the intellect alone … I readily discover that there is nothing more easily or clearly apprehended than my own mind." (§16)

The conclusion Descartes draws from the wax is about the mind's superior knowability, not the wax's nature. That is epistemology doing the work in a chapter the corpus files under metaphysics, which is the seam this spoke's standing open question keeps finding.

Edition caveats — name the edition when you cite a number

Two, both the same shape as the Meiklejohn problem recorded a few hours earlier.

Numbering. The paragraph numbers used above (§3, §6, §8, §16) are the Veitch text's own. Scholarship cites the Meditations by AT volume and page (Adam & Tannery) — AT VII for the Latin, AT IX for the French. The two do not line up, so never cross-reference a section number between this page and secondary literature without saying which edition it came from.
Bracketed insertions. Veitch prints material in square brackets — "[conceives]", "[or rightly comprehended by thought]" — taken from the 1647 French version, which Descartes approved but did not write. Quotations above keep the brackets so the two texts stay distinguishable.
Wikisource's own header states that the source document for this transcription is not known. The text matches Veitch as printed elsewhere, but the provenance chain has a gap in it and that is worth saying out loud on a page that exists to be more reliable than a summary.

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