Essential Passages · 5 selections
Ideas worth
reading firsthand.
These selections follow Descartes from radical doubt to the certainty of the thinking self, then through the wax argument and the distinction between mind and body. The framing is by Ergo; Descartes's translated text is unchanged.
René Descartes · 1641
Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (1911)
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01
Meditation I · 2 min
The Dream Argument
Descartes asks how waking experience can certify itself from within. Dreams can reproduce the feeling of sitting by a fire, looking at a page, or moving a hand. The argument does not prove that life is a dream; it shows that ordinary sensory confidence is not yet certainty.
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02
Meditation I · 4 min
The Evil Genius
To make doubt as demanding as possible, Descartes imagines a deceiver powerful enough to manipulate even his simplest judgments. The device turns doubt into a deliberate discipline: assent will be withheld from anything that can be called into question. What survives this test must be secure even under total deception.
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03
Meditation II · 8 min
“I Am, I Exist”
The attempt to doubt everything discovers something it cannot erase. Even if a deceiver misleads Descartes about every object, there must be a thinker who is being deceived. From that first certainty he begins to ask what the self is, arriving at the idea of a thinking thing.
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04
Meditation II · 6 min
The Piece of Wax
A piece of wax changes every sensible quality when it is brought near the fire, yet we judge it to be the same body. Descartes argues that the mind, rather than sensation or imagination alone, grasps what the wax is. The example also deepens his claim that the mind is known more clearly than bodies.
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05
Meditation VI · 5 min
Mind and Body
Descartes finally argues that mind and body can be clearly conceived apart: mind as thinking and unextended, body as extended and non-thinking. He immediately complicates that distinction by examining sensation and the intimate way a person experiences embodiment. This is the foundation of the dualism associated with his name.