Routledge Philosophy Guidebook To Descartes And The Meditations

Rene Descartes is generally accepted as the "father of modern philosophy", and his Meditations is perhaps the most famous philosophical text ever written. In this Routledge Philosophy GuideBook, Gary Hatfield guides the reader through the text of the Meditations, providing commentary and analysis throughout. He assesses Descartes' importance in the history of philosophy and his continuing relevance to contemporary thought. Descartes and the Meditations will be essential reading for all students of philosophy, and for anyone coming to Descartes for the first time.

Rene Descartes is generally accepted as the "father of modern philosophy", and his Meditations is perhaps the most famous philosophical text ever written. In this Routledge Philosophy GuideBook, Gary Hatfield guides the reader through the text of the Meditations, providing commentary and analysis throughout. He assesses Descartes' importance in the history of philosophy and his continuing relevance to contemporary thought. Descartes and the Meditations will be essential reading for all students of philosophy, and for anyone coming to Descartes for the first time.

Descartes is widely regarded to be the father of modern philosophy and his Meditations is among the most important philosophical texts ever written. The Routledge Guidebook to Descartes’ Meditations introduces the major themes in Descartes’ great book and acts as a companion for reading this key work, examining: The context of Descartes’ work and the background to his writing Each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, meanings and impact The reception the book received when first seen by the world The relevance of Descartes’ work to modern philosophy, it’s legacy and influence With further reading included throughout, this text follows Descartes’ original work closely, making it essential reading for all students of philosophy, and all those wishing to get to grips with this classic work.

This guidebook will be an indispensable introduction to what is one of the most important texts in the history of philosophy. Offering an introduction to the background, a careful reading of the text and an investigation of main themes.

Husserlian phenomenology has been attracting increasing interest. This volume provides an introduction to the key concepts that arise in the text of Husserl's 'Cartesian Meditations'.

Between Two Worlds is an authoritative commentary on--and powerful reinterpretation of--the founding work of modern philosophy, Descartes's Meditations. Philosophers have tended to read Descartes's seminal work in an occasional way, examining its treatment of individual topics while ignoring other parts of the text. In contrast, John Carriero provides a sustained, systematic reading of the whole text, giving a detailed account of the positions against which Descartes was reacting, and revealing anew the unity, meaning, and originality of the Meditations. Carriero finds in the Meditations a nearly continuous argument against Thomistic Aristotelian ways of thinking about cognition, and shows more clearly than ever before how Descartes bridged the old world of scholasticism and the new one of mechanistic naturalism. Rather than casting Descartes's project primarily in terms of skepticism, knowledge, and certainty, Carriero focuses on fundamental disagreements between Descartes and the scholastics over the nature of understanding, the relation between the senses and the intellect, the nature of the human being, and how and to what extent God is cognized by human beings. Against this background, Carriero shows, Descartes developed his own conceptions of mind, body, and the relation between them, creating a coherent, philosophically rich project in the Meditations and setting the agenda for a century of rationalist metaphysics.

A solid grasp of the main themes and arguments of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes is essential for understanding modern thought, and a necessary entrée to the work of the Empiricists and Immanuel Kant. It is also crucial to the study of contemporary epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. This new edition of Georges Dicker's commentary on Descartes's masterpiece, Meditations on First Philosophy, features a new chapter on the Fourth Meditation and improved treatments of the famous cogito ergo sum and the notorious problem of the Cartesian Circle, among numerous other improvements and updates. Clear and accessible, it serves as an introduction to Descartes's ideas for undergraduates and as a sophisticated companion to his Meditations for advanced readers. The volume provides a thorough discussion of several basic issues of epistemology and metaphysics elicited from the main themes and arguments of the Meditations. It also delves into the work's historical background and critical reception. Dicker offers his own assessments of the Cartesian Doubt, the cogito, the causal and ontological proofs of God's existence, Cartesian freedom and theodicy, Cartesian Dualism, and Descartes's views about the existence and nature of the material world. The commentary also incorporates a wealth of recent Descartes scholarship, and inculcates -- but does not presuppose -- knowledge of the methods of contemporary analytic philosophy.

This is an updated edition of John Cottingham's acclaimed translation of Descartes's philosophical masterpiece, including an abridgement of Descartes's Objections and Replies.