meditations on first philosophy · descartes

René Descartes' Meditations of 1641 doubt everything that can be doubted and rebuild knowledge from the one certainty that the doubter exists. The six meditations establish the mind as distinct from the body, prove God's existence and use it to secure the sciences, and the appended Objections and Replies record the fight his contemporaries put up.

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies, translated and edited by John Cottingham (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Read in full over two sessions, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors, including the Selections from the Objections and Replies.