The book

René Descartes was a seventeenth-century French philosopher who spent much of his later working life in the Netherlands. He wrote the Meditations on First Philosophy there; it was first published in 1641.

The main text is short: six pieces, called six meditations. They are written in the first person. Near the beginning, the speaker sits by a fire in a winter gown, holding a sheet of paper. He is going to doubt whatever can be doubted and see whether anything remains.

The thinking has the shape of successive days. In the Fourth Meditation, he says he has lately grown accustomed to drawing his mind away from the senses. Later he looks back on the exaggerated doubts of the preceding days. A philosophical inquiry becomes the experience of someone sitting there, returning to the work.

He describes what he wants through Archimedes: give Archimedes one fixed and immovable point, and he could shift the earth. Let this thinker find even the smallest thing that is certain and unshakable, and he too may hope for something considerable.

Before the familiar quotation

Many readers arrive carrying the words “I think, therefore I am.” Those are not the words of the six meditations themselves. There the formulation is “I am, I exist,” followed by a qualification: whenever I utter it or conceive it in my mind, it must be true.

The qualification belongs to the claim. Each time it is thought or said, it cannot be withdrawn at that very moment.

But the familiar formula does appear elsewhere in the volume. Its first appearance comes in the First Objections, where Caterus quotes it as Descartes’ claim: I think, therefore I am. Descartes uses it himself in the Second Replies, to explain that it is not a syllogism. One does not first establish a general premise that everything which thinks exists, then apply it. The mind recognizes the connection directly.

The objections

The unusual part comes after the meditations. Descartes did not simply finish his manuscript and send it to a printer. Before publication, it went to learned readers for examination. A priest wrote the first objections, conveyed through two friends. Other sets followed a challenge circulated by Marin Mersenne, who solicited responses from a number of people.

The first edition included six sets of objections and Descartes’ replies. The second added a seventh. The title page announced objections by learned men, together with the author’s answers.

An appendix, apparently. Yet these exchanges occupy far more space than the six meditations. Most of the volume consists of people attacking the argument and its author answering them.

Some were formidable names: Hobbes, Arnauld, Gassendi. Nor does one set always mean one person; some speak throughout as “we.” And they were not all responding in isolation to the same untouched manuscript. At least the fifth set had seen earlier objections, and the sixth had seen earlier replies. The conversation was already affecting what later participants could say.

Two faces of the same book

One distinction matters from the outset. That account concerns the Latin editions. A French edition appeared in 1647, and it is not simply the Latin book reflected in another language.

The differences themselves become part of this series. One set of objections changes position. One word fails to match the opponent’s original wording in both languages. Two of the essays will stay with those details.

The readings retain the Chinese manuscript’s renderings, checked against the Latin text in volume VII of the Adam–Tannery edition, the French text and editorial explanations in volume IX, and the University of Caen’s digital Descartes corpus. Essay Five also relies on a report published in 1650; its indirect and adversarial character is made explicit there.

The six essays

These pieces follow what can be seen in the arrangement of the book: why Descartes wanted objections printed, how his arrangement worked, and what happened when parts of it passed into other people’s hands.

An optional note after each essay places a contemporary framework, SAE, beside the passage. These are comparisons, not proofs of one philosophy by another. They can be left unread. The book and the people arguing inside it come first.