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MEDITATIONS ON
FIRST PHILOSOPHY
René Descartes was born at La Haye near Tours on 31 March
1596.He was educated at the Jesuit Collège de la Flèche in Anjou, and
at the University of Poitiers, where he took a Licenciate in Law in
1616. Two years later he entered the army of Prince Maurice of
Nassau in Holland, and met a local schoolmaster, Isaac Beeckman,
who fostered his interest in mathematics and physics. After further
travels in Europe he settled in Paris in 1625, and came into contact
with scientists, theologians, and philosophers in the circle of the
Minim friar Marin Mersenne. At the end of 1928Descartes left for
Holland, which he made his home until 1648; he devoted himself to
carrying forward the mathematical, scientific, and philosophical
work he had begun in Paris. When he learned of the condemnation
of Galileo for heresy in 1633, he abandoned his plans to publish a
treatise on physics, and under pressure from his friends consented
to have the Discourse on the Method printed, with three accompany-
ing essays on topics in which he had made discoveries. In 1641his
Meditationsappeared, setting out the metaphysical underpinnings of
his physical theories; these were accompanied by objections written
by contemporary philosophers, and Descartes’s replies to them.
His writings provoked controversy in both France and Holland,
where his scientific ideas were banned in one university; his works,
however (including the Principles of Philosophyof1644) continued to
be published, and to bring him notoriety and renown. In 1648 he
accepted an invitation from Queen Christina of Sweden to settle in
Stockholm; it was there he died of pneumonia on 11February1650.
Michael Moriartyis Centenary Professor of French Literature
and Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. Among his
publications are Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion
(2003) and Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French
Thought II(2006).
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
RENÉ DESCARTES
Meditations on
First Philosophy
With Selections from the
Objections and Replies
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
MICHAEL MORIARTY
1
3
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Descartes, René, 1596–1650.
[Meditationes de prima philosophia. English]
Meditations on first philosophy: with selections from the objections and replies/
René Descartes translated with an introduction and notes by Michael Moriarty.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN978–0–19–280696–3
1. First philosophy. 2. God—Proof, Ontological. 3. Methodology. 4. Knowledge,
Theory of. I. Moriarty, Mike. II. Title.
B1853.E5M67 2008
194--dc22
2007044519
Typeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc
ISBN978–0–19–280696–3
13579108642
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
List of Abbreviations vii
Introduction ix
Note on the Text and Translation xli
Select Bibliography xlvi
A Chronology of René Descartes xlix
MEDITATIONS ON FIRST PHILOSOPHY 1
Letter of Dedication 3
Preface to the Reader 7
Synopsis of the following Six Meditations 10
First Meditation 13
Second Meditation 17
Third Meditation 25
Fourth Meditation 38
Fifth Meditation 45
Sixth Meditation 51
THE OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES 65
Introduction 67
First Objections and Replies 74
Second Objections and Replies 85
Third Objections 107
Fourth Objections and Replies 125
Fifth Objections and Replies 166
Sixth Objections and Replies 199
Seventh Objections 214
Explanatory Notes 232
Index 273
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have many people to thank for assistance with this edition. In par-
ticular, I would like to thank Terence Cave, Hannah Dawson, Susan
James, Ian Maclean, and Morag Shiach for their generous assistance
and support. I am most grateful to the anonymous readers for Oxford
University Press for their valuable comments and suggestions. As
series editor, Judith Luna has been an unfailing source of guidance
and encouragement. Thanks also to Jeff New for his painstaking
and vigilant copy-editing. As always, my colleagues at Queen Mary,
University of London, have been a pleasure to work with and along-
side. This work was begun in the last stages of a research leave jointly
funded by Queen Mary and the Arts and Humanities Research
Council. I am most grateful for this support.
Anyone working on Descartes knows how much he or she owes to
the generations of scholars in various disciplines and from many
countries whose work has illuminated the life, background, and above
all the texts of this author. I hope that my own debts are, however
imperfectly, acknowledged in the notes.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AT Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery,
11vols., rev. edn. (Paris: Vrin, 1996)
BGDM Stephen Gaukroger (ed.),The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’
‘Meditations’(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)
CCD John Cottingham (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to
Descartes(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992)
CHSCP Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.),The Cambridge
History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,2vols.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Discourse Descartes,A Discourse on the Method,ed. and trans.
Ian Maclean, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006)
F Descartes,Meditations,French text
JHI Journal of the History of Ideas
L Descartes,Meditations,Latin text
OP Descartes,Œuvres philosophiques,ed. Ferdinand Alquié,
3 vols., Classiques Garnier (Paris: Garnier, 1963–73)
PL Patrologiæ cursus completus, Series latina,ed. J. P. Migne
(Paris: Migne,1844–55)
VS Montaigne,Les Essais,ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier,
3vols. paginated as one (Paris: Quadrige/Presses
Universitaires de France, 1992[1st publ.1924])
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INTRODUCTION
Descartes’sMeditationsis among the most influential texts in the his-
tory of Western philosophy. Many thinkers have challenged or
rejected his thought, some of them almost totally, but his rigorous
questioning of traditional certainties is at the source of most subse-
quent philosophical developments. The criticism he has received and
continues to receive is a backhanded compliment he would not have
appreciated, but an index, nonetheless, of the power of his philosophy.
Descartes’s Life
Descartes was born in 1596, in La Haye, a town in Touraine (central-
western France): the family home was in Châtellerault, in the neigh-
bouring province of Poitou.1 France was emerging from a civil war
between Catholics and Protestants that had lasted for over thirty
years. His family’s background was in the legal profession and the
royal administration. The office held by his father conferred noble
rank, but such office-holding nobles had far less prestige than the
military nobility. Yet Descartes, as Ian Maclean observes, derived a
sense of status from this background, borne out in his later attitudes,
including a tendency to refuse to be identified as a professional
scholar.2In1607he entered the Jesuit college of La Flèche, near Le
Mans, where he received an excellent education, which he describes
1 For biographical material I have drawn on Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An
Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Geneviève Rodis-
Lewis,Descartes: biographie(Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995: in English as Descartes: His
Life and Thought, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998));
A. C. Grayling, Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and its Place in his Times(London:
The Free Press, 2005); Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006). I am particularly grateful to Ian Maclean for his
comments on a draft of this Introduction as well as on the draft Explanatory Notes.
2 Descartes, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and
Seeking Truth in the Sciences, ed. and trans. Ian Maclean, Oxford World’s Classics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. viii, xli, xliii. All references to the Discourse
are to this edition, which gives a very full account of the context and significance of the
text. (I give first the Part of the text referred to, and then the page number, so that ii. 15
refers to Part II of the Discourse, the passage in question being found on p. 15.)
