Rene Discartes, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, proposes his theories on the existance of God and on the human soul. This book is an exploration into the mind of the man who said "I think, therefore i am." In Discartes' First Philosophy he thinks twice about things that many of us don't think about once, and proposes not only his ideas, but also his thought process in coming to those ideas. This book is a 'must-have' in the collection of anyone who can appreciate deeper thought.

This book analyzes the central role the metaphors play in human thought. Metaphors reveal and highlight certain
aspects as well as hide other aspects. As scientists we use theoretical models to understand the real world constantly. The
fact these models are metaphors is crucial to understanding many debates about the realism and lack thereof of scientific theories. I am surprised that the set of ideas contained in this book is so little known and discussed in academic circles. I
have not read them, but more recent books like Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By probably cover the same ground.

Descartes correspondence is key to understanding his texts. This source book brings to light otherwise untranslated letters from Descartes to his most trusted friends describing his fears and desires for his work. Kenny, as usual, does an excellent job!

The Anchor volume "The Rationalists" is a very handy one-volume compilation of the central texts of 17th Century Continental philosophy. Included are Descartes' "Discourse on Method" and "Meditations," Spinoza's "Ethics," and Leibnitz's "Discourse on Metaphysics" and the "Monadology." The only really famous text excluded here is Spinoza's "De Emendatione," but the inexpensive Prometheus Books paperback of the "Ethics" includes that. This handsome, portable paperback allows one to explore the development of Rationalist thinking chronologically from Descartes to Leibnitz without suffering the bloody-chunks omissions imposed by most undergrad philosophy texts. And the absence of scholarly commentary thankfully allows the reader to immerse herself fully in the preoccupations of these thinkers without constant hectoring about how they "failed"; instead, each of these multifaceted thinkers can prod the reader on their own terms. This is a wonderful volume not only for the philosopher or student of philosophy, but for theologians, historians, and even artists-- these three have much to say that is still pertinent for any reflective person.

Even though the writings of Descartes are now universally being regarded as being wrong, it is still a worthwhile read, as thousands of well-respected critics too this first philosophy and created there own philosophies. Regarded as the founder of Modern Philosophy, the writings of Descartes have been used to bring us to the post-modern writings of Lacan, Camus, and others. I think therefore I am? Sure, a logical fallacy...but, damned if I would have thought it on my own.

Although the Cress version, like most other translations, looses precision in transition from Latin to English, it is still a classic that is a absolute must read for anyone who is serious about understanding metaphysics. Descartes shows that one's consciousness is itself an undeniable fact of existence; so long as conciousness exists it is a certain fact that something exists, namely the conciousness itself. What is that conciousness? It is us. Conscious beings are what we essentially are, says Descartes.

When the first artifical intelligences struggle with the question "what am I?" they will, if they are not only intelligent but also conscious, come to conclusions similar to Descartes'.

Rene Descartes' concept "cogito ergo sum" (often translated, somewhat misleadingly, as "I think therefore I am") stands as one of the few unshaken foundations of modern philosophy. Some philosophers see a fallacy in logic of "cogito ergo sum" but the fallacy is in the translation rather than in the logic. The words "cogito" and "scientia" are very loosely and interchangebly translated as "think" or "knowledge" but they mean quite different things. The cogito phrase, so often translated as "I think therefore I am", really means that conciousness implies existence. Descartes writings certainly have many flaws, such as his weak "proof" of the existence of God. Yet many of his errors may be attributed to his living in the age of the inqusition and his desire to cover is own assets. It is said that when Descartes found out Galileo had been arrested for communicating his astronomical discoveries, Descartes literally ran to puplishing house to stop the presses that were printing his own similar scientific discoveries. The "Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy" is a monument of achievement in modern philosophy. We are conciousness beings, and few books bring the implications of that fact more vividly to live than the "Meditations". If you can't read the original Latin then by all means get your hands on a good translation. Don't rely on some commentator telling you what is or is not of value in Descartes. There is no substitute for the original.

Be sure to follow up Descartes with the philosophical writings of George Berkeley and David Hume. They are giants. If you stand on their shoulders you will see far.

Using the locii problems investigated by Apollonius, Descartes employs the rules of his "method" in this treatise on geometry. By approaching geometrical problems with algebraic processes and vice versa, he manages to create point coordinate geometry. This work drastically changed the way in which we view conic sections as well as the very process of analytic inquiry. The math is mostly straightforward and more familiar to the reader than the works of the ancient mathematicians. It is not neccesary to have studied much previous mathematical works to gain a basic comprehension of Descartes' solutions. Attempting at most times to maintain the simple and straighforward presentation advocated by his method, Descartes will give you most of the basics that you need to understand the rest of the work. However, close concentration must be paid for the math to mean anything. It is easy to skip a step in a proof and find yourself completely lost. Given the proper patience, this work is invaluable for anyone who wants to see the origins of our method of thought today. Fascinating both as a mathematical treatise and as a perfect trial run for anyone wanting to follow the cartesian method of learning.

This book contains a facsimile of the original version which runs nearly page for page with the English version. This is a true mathematical masterpiece. This was the supposed beginning of analytical Geometry(although it is now known that this was not true). It's a great book to work through that should be accessable to a high school student with some Geometry background. A Fantastic Book!

I wish that I could start this discussion at the level of people who have already read this book, but the more likely possibility is that I'm about the only person trying to convince anyone that a certain discussion in this book might be considered important. As much as I like Nietzsche, I tend to think about his approach only regarding a few problems that interest me. I'm actually more interested in this book for its treatment of a problem in political philosophy that was considered important enough for Bacon's views to be included in this book, but, as hardly anyone can keep up with everything that is going on, my own curiosity about which views anyone might hold are rather mute in the ominous flow of events in our own time.

People who read Nietzsche might agree that he has arrived at a philosophy which attempts to describe the world as it strikes people in modern times. The introduction of this book talks of partisans, but also of an understanding of them which allows a Hegelian "act of magic which preserves what is good for us in each inheritance while letting the junk fall away. The recovery of Bacon and Descartes reestablishes a radical and sober perspective on our spiritual heritage; in their work our philosophic and religious inheritances come to light as spiritual opponents harboring starkly different dispositions to life, and their efforts, so far from harmonizing opposites, kindle spiritual warfare between them, the warfare Nietzsche advances and brings into the open." (pp. 4-5). This book makes each of the three philosophers seem worthy of their places in the history of philosophy, but in our thoroughly comic society, the only question that those who don't know anything about this are likely to ask, is: Who are these people trying to impress?

Chapter 4 of this book, "Why Incite a Holy War?" contains a discussion as six characters present views on a war like the clash of civilizations between the superpower military complex and the fanatics, except that Bacon was writing about a situation in the 1620s which also had a context of religious warfare between Christians within Europe. Bacon had given a speech in "the prosecution of a young Roman Catholic named Owen indicted on charges of high treason for speeches advocating the lawfulness of killing a king who has been excommunicated." (p. 93). That such an act might be blessed by a particular religion is noted by Lampert in his observation, "France, where Bacon's dialogue is now unfolding, had experienced the new doctrine still more directly in the blessed assassinations of its two previous kings." (p. 93).

An insult is as subversive of this kind of thing, as well as being great for avoiding any discussion today, for those who have been doing fine without an opinion so far. This book credits one such statement to "Baconian Christianity whose charity has turned practical and technological," though it is offer in the discussion as merely an opinion, "`That the Philosopher's Stone, and an Holy War, were but the rendez-vous of cracked brains, that wore their feather in their head instead of their hat.'" (p. 87). I don't have that kind of a hat, anymore, but it seems to me that modern education, which this book might represent, is teaching students to pay more attention to what hat they are wearing in a particular situation, as the discussion of a Holy War does, than to attend to anything which might be innate in their brains, which may be pretty unlikely in a society whose relentless messages are supposedly based on endless flexibility.

My big disagreement about these things goes back to the postmoral stance proclaimed on page 5, which is "heir to ten thousand years in the development of conscience." Dividing the 2,000,000 people in prison in the United States today by those 10,000 years might mean that, compared to what most of us have learned each year, there have always been another 200 people who didn't quite get it yet, and, if they were easy enough to catch, had to be added to the number of people in prison each year. As embarrassing as it is to think about anything, expecting such precision in our thinking about how things really go has now become as unlikely as expecting any results from philosophy. I shouldn't pick on a great book like this, but these are hard times.

Bacon and Descartes appear in this book not as mere proto-scientists but as the great philosophers and rhetoricians that they truly were. Lampert writes beautifully and brilliantly and his close reading of Nietzsche and his precursors makes for an exceptional book.

In Nihilism Before Nietzsche, Michael Allen Gillespie argues that Nietzsche ripped off his entire philosophy from Schopenhauer, Kant, and Fichte. His "Will to Power" concept, says Gillespie, that Nietzsche says it is in all things, is proof that Nietzsche believes in the absolute. That Nietzsche even developed the Will to Power is due to his early influence and later rejection of Schopenhauer's "Will to Life." That Kant and Fichte worked with concerns for the noemena or "Beyond" is where Nietzsche becomes able to have his phenomenal world boundaries, says Gillespie. Nietzsche's concept of Nihilism comes not from the great analytic tradition where the absolute nothing of the Beyond is deified, but rather from active Russian Nihilism, he says. His Dionysus concept that sprung Nietzsche's Overman comes from Wagner and indicates "the radically free will not bound by past actions, [where] change is the result not of determinate negation but of absolute negation" (252). This capricious transrational will was common to the nominalist notion of God, he says. Therefore, Nietzsche is not novel, but has simply reinvented Christianity under a new guise.

Gillespie's point against the novelty or originality of Nietzsche's working conditions is flatly outside of the realm of philosophy. He clearly has not taken into consideration Nietzsche's meaning, which is Nietzsche's epistemological work-ethic in action. Rather, the case for Gillespie is to see who came up with what first. What consolation this ultimatum of novelty has one can only guess. Certainly, the boundaries and concepts Nietzsche works with come from his exposure to his milieu. What is the point of that? Certainly he would not quarrel over such trifles in action, although he certainly thought himself to be novel. That he was novel does not fall, however, simply because of the claims Gillespie raises. The man discovered things against his backdrop; we are being-there-with-others. How does the coincidental discovery of working concepts by someone after another say anything for the meaning of their philosophy? And as far as the claim of the "Will to Power" as evidence of Nietzsche's absolute is concerned, clearly no acknowledgment of Nietzsche's meaning has been made whatsoever here. What the Will to Power is resides in the human, but is encroached by the structures wielding the herd instinct. That is where Nietzsche is working, as we have seen, and that has nothing to do with a Beyond or any absolute. Rather, it is dealing within the now. There is no "omnipotent will" in Nietzsche, particularly because his prime motivation was the fear that Christianity and its universalist bastard offshoots would write the individual out of existence all together. Nietzsche's refusal to throw out any human system, contrary to the cultural philistine and, really, contemporary self-professed post-modern "radicals," clearly shows that his last resort, "The Last Man" no less, is one that maintains the system of Christianity as such before doing away with it. This is out of respect, the most profound respect in this writer's opinion, for the human being, the individual, self-with-other, known because there is the other. To get rid of that is indeed to extirpate willing altogether - a very real Angst residing in the eminent probability that nothing is absolute. Nietzsche, therefore, remains in a continuously willed positivistic phenomenology. The popular willing the belief in a rational ghost of will that is behind all things Nietzsche saw as leading to the creation of conditions allowing the end of the individual's willing. Christianity as a system to Nietzsche was a willing nothing, but not an absense of willing. That absense of any willing at all is Nietzsche's understanding of Nihilism, be it semantically different from apologists of idealism like Gillespie or not. And that the Christian's detriment to the individual's willing logically brings the prospect of no willing whatsoever, this cancels out any and all absolutes. This Nihilism is possible, and Nietzsche continues to hail as the most Anti-Nihilist philosopher thus far. Gillespie is sorely off the mark; too much time in the hollows of academia. Should one want anything to do with Nietzshe's philosophy, this book is a waste of time and could even be called a bag of utterly pompous namedroppings from the rotting epochs of the obfuscation of truth we can only respect insofar as our reaction to them has plunged us on. Whether that "on" is progress, however, is up to the individual to decide. Quibbling about semantics and what self-acclaimed, anachronistic "philosophers" INTENDED universally, rather than what their actions indicate, is all this book ammounts to. And thereto, it is very close to not willing anything but a bullet in the foot, that is, if any philosophy was to be done. Rather, read some R.J. Hollingdale on Nietzsche. Or, perhaps, read me on my geocities website.

This work challenges Nietzsche's claim on the term and concept of 'nihilism'.
Hegel's notion of the history of philosophy in relation to a philosophy of history seems as obscure as the core of (his)philosophy itself, yet the history of philosophy is closely cousin to the dynamics of the modern, and we see Hegel's point better than he in the strange way the rise of modernity transforms a complex series of thoughts, streaming in from the medieval, evoked and tuned by Descartes, climaxing in the period of Kant,and his successors, the relation of Fichte to Kant being crucial, yet with an echo of Descartes. It is all too arcane, and proceeds in disguises. Like particles in an atom smasher the breakdown products stream across the nineteenth century and beyond. The point is that anything succeeding the period of early transformation has a poor chance of escaping the comprehensive nature of the 'history' as 'philosophy'.
Nietzsche cries out to be seen as entirely original, progressing beyond this peak,in some ways he is, yet we should wonder at his place in this sequence. Sure enough, as this work shows, the connection is direct. The relation to Schopenhauer is the obvious clue, but in this fascinating and quite compelling account Gillespie digs deeper to find the direct relationship to Fichte, and his response to the achievement of Kant. Fichte is the fall guy, forever excoriated, yet the man who is the key to what comes later. Here the words 'will', 'absolute I', and 'god' are the verbal chimeras of Fichte's entry into the noumenal realm, a venture denounced with his last breath by Kant. From there the explanation is suddenly clear, almost too clear perhaps, and proceeds through the Romantics, Hegel, the Left Hegelians, the Russian nihilists, and finally Nietzsche and his Dionysus.
Nietzscheans should tighten their seatbelts here, but the ride is worth it. Fascinating piece.

Gillespie makes clear his understanding of nihilism the book takes an almost history of Nihilisam approach to create a new idea of the often confused philosophy found in Nihilism. The book is well written and a sweet read.

Anyone who attempts to make philosophy accessible to non-academics certainly has the tip of my hat, but DESCARTES IN 90 MINUTES sacrifices too much substance in the interest of readability. This book would be OK for a high school student preparing a short paper or presentation on French philosopher/mathematician Rene Descarte, but for those of us who are motivated by anything more than casual curiosity about philosophers will be left unsatisfied.

I did learn quite a few facts from this very clearly-written book, such as Descarte's odd sleeping habits, his apparent facility in composing musical verse, and his compulsive wanderlust. The problem is that biographies of Great Thinkers just don't have a lot of impact without including some exposition of their Great Thoughts. "I think, therefore I am," is about as deep as it gets here.

Starthern's goal is to provide a quick, flawless guide to the major thinkers of the world: I'm unclear as to whether he succeeded or not. I suppose he succeeds simply because he has published these works, people buy them, and they are quite popular. I am not a stickler for erudition, I would have like to have learned from this series, but there just isn't enough information on the philosopher's work. If you're in a philosophy class and want to get a quick preview of what you're going to learn, chances are you will find more or less the same information in the introduction of your text. If you just want to learn on your own, it's your decision as to what you're looking for. For example, this is what I learned about Descartes from this book:

1) He was an eccentric who liked to sleep in 2) His theories on mathmatics were contraversial 3) He believes that we exist simply because we think 4) He died for a silly reason.

That's it folks. #2 & 3 may seem exciting, but there is no explanation as to why or how these manifests themself.

Strathern is a master at this kind of work, which mixes biography, critical analysis, historical context and humor all in a concise, informative & entertaining package. He lists a time line for the philosopher, his place in world/philosophic history & a selection of works for furthur reading. This series of books by Strathern is a wonderful course in Philosophy 101 without ever having to go to college, all presented in plain, easy to understand English without being bogged down with philosophy's often confusing vernacular.

The negative nature of this review reflects upon this particular translation of Descartes' seminal work, not upon the content of the work itself. The edition in question (ISBN: 0330067739), published by Yale University Press and edited by David Weissman, utilizes a translation rendered originally for Cambridge University Press in 1911. Unfortunately, this translation does much to obfuscate a work that should help enlighten.

The saving grace of this edition is that 3/4's of the book consists of nine separate essays, many of which are excellent, that review a broad spectrum of topics pertaining to Descartes and his ideas.

I recommend that you buy this book for the excellent supplementary materials, but look elsewhere for a modern translation (i.e. the John Cottingham translation in the 'new' Cambridge Philosophy series).

Usually, philosophy books speak only to academic philosophers. This one shows Descartes' influence in a wide range of domains, including math and science, ethics and politics, psychology, and literature and the arts. The nine essays that complement Descartes' texts (the Discourse and Meditations) are accessible, but deeply informed. They have little or no competition. The translation is classic and clean, not fussy. This is not the last word on Descartes. Professorial competition guarantees many more. But this book is both scholarly and provocative.