Discourse on the Method by René Descartes [PDF]
by InfoBooks
Discourse on the Method was written in French, not in the Latin of Descartes's teachers. He explains why in the last pages: he trusted readers who use their own natural reason more than those who only listen to the ancients.
This version of Discourse on the Method in PDF is our own edition from Project Aldus: the complete text, with the six parts set out so you can find a passage and come back to it later.
The download is free and needs no sign-up. One click and all six parts are yours, from his schooldays to the reasons he almost kept his physics to himself.
Discourse on the Method by René Descartes
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Information: Discourse on the Method
- Author: René Descartes
- Publication Date: 1637
- Main Characters:
- René Descartes: The narrator. He tells the story of his own education, his doubts about everything he was taught, and the method he built to find his way out of them.
- The Method: Four short rules: accept nothing as true without clear evidence, divide every problem into parts, think from the simplest to the most complex, and review everything so nothing is left out.
- The Provisional Morality: Three practical maxims Descartes adopts while he doubts everything else, so he can keep living decisively. The idea: like a house you stay in while yours is being rebuilt.
- The Cogito: "I think, therefore I am." The one certainty that survives total doubt, and the first stone of his whole philosophy.
- God: Descartes argues that the idea of a perfect being could not come from himself, and uses that proof to guarantee that clear and distinct ideas are true.
- Brief Summary: Descartes opens with his own story: a brilliant education at La Flèche that left him with more doubts than certainties. In Part II he lays out four rules for reasoning, modeled on the clarity of geometry. Part III offers a provisional moral code to live by while everything else is in question. Part IV pushes doubt to its limit and finds the one thing he cannot doubt, his own thinking, before moving on to God and the soul. The last two parts apply the method to physics, the circulation of the blood, and the difference between humans and machines, and explain why he hesitated to publish.
- Thematic Analysis: The central theme is method: the conviction that good sense is equally shared and that what separates people is how they use it. Descartes explores radical doubt, the certainty of the thinking self, and the split between mind and body. He also defends the idea that science should make us "lords and possessors of nature" for the good of humanity.
- Historical Context: Descartes published the Discourse anonymously in Leiden in 1637, as the preface to three scientific essays on optics, meteorology and geometry. He had shelved an earlier work after Galileo was condemned in 1633, which explains the cautious tone of Part VI. This edition uses John Veitch's English translation from the 19th century, the version most readers in English know.