Between Two Worlds: A Reading of Descartes's Meditations

538 Pages·2008·2.08 MB·English

by  John Carriero

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
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Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carriero, John Peter.
Between two worlds : a reading of Descartes’s Meditations / John Carriero.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-13560-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-691-13561-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Descartes, René, 1596–1650. Meditationes de prima philosophia. 2. First
philosophy. I. Title.
B1854.C36 2009
194—dc22 2008036732
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Dante Typeface
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
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For Katya
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Contents
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Preface ix
Note on Translations xv
Introduction 1
1 The First Meditation 27
2 The Second Meditation 65
3 (I) The Third Meditation:
The Truth Rule and the “Chief and Most Common Mistake” 128
3 (II) The Third Meditation:
Two Demonstrations of God’s Existence 168
4 The Fourth Meditation 223
5 The Fifth Meditation 280
6 The Sixth Meditation 359
Notes 427
Bibliography 489
Index Locorum 495
Subject Index 505
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Preface
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C
AN SOMEONE today take up a work of philosophy written over
350 years ago and engage with it on its own terms? This book is an
attempt to do so with Descartes’s Meditations concerning First Philosophy.
My goal is to work through the text as it appears and to confront it in an
unfi ltered way. When I draw on material other than the Meditations—
historical background, other writings of Descartes, or, occasionally, other
scholars’ interpretations—it is because I have found it necessary for mak-
ing philosophical sense of Descartes’s thought. I hope that these excur-
sions away from the Meditations will be justifi ed by making his argument
more understandable when I return.
There is much to be gained by working through the text of Medita-
tions, with care, in a relatively unmediated way. I am encouraged in this
thought by my experience reading Thomas Aquinas’s commentaries on
Aristotle, which are based on lectures he gave one and a half millennia
after Aristotle lived. Aquinas, working through Aristotle’s text line by
line, gradually develops a philosophically powerful picture of Aristotle’s
thought. To be sure, Aquinas’s commentaries benefi t from a long tradi-
tion of response to Aristotle’s texts, especially by Averroes (referred to by
Aquinas simply as “the commentator”); and Aquinas occasionally pro-
vides some (ancient) historical context and sometimes takes up the posi-
tions of other interpreters. All the same, his lectures are squarely focused
on Aristotle’s text and comparatively uncluttered by other matters. Such
an approach is well suited to Aristotle because he is a systematic thinker,
as a sustained reading of his texts brings out. This kind of approach
makes it natural to draw maps of the individual works and chapters,
posting on them “you are here” fl ags; it also encourages refl ection on the
fl ow of Aristotle’s discussion—why he takes up the topics he does, why
he treats them in the order that he does, and how they are interrelated.
Descartes’s Meditations is systematic and philosophically rich enough
to merit similar treatment. I say similar, because I do not try to give the
text the line-by-line treatment one fi nds in the tradition of Aristotelian
commentary; I also allow myself more latitude to draw on other materi-
als that I think are necessary for understanding Descartes’s text or at least
can signifi cantly enhance our understanding of it. But I do usually work
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