- 01Translator’s Preface to the Reader
- 02Translator’s preface and contents
- 03Meditation I: Doubt and the senses
- 04Universal doubt and suspension of assent
- 05The evil spirit hypothesis
- 06Difficulty of maintaining doubt
- 01The certainty of existence in doubt
- 02The mind as a thinking thing
- 03Imagination, sense, and corporeal things
- 01The wax’s changing sensory qualities
- 02The mind’s inspection of the wax
- 03Self-knowledge and the mind’s certainty
Meditations on First Philosophy
Knowledge, mind, God, and skepticism.
19Chapters
36Lessons
85Topics
Certificate of completion included
This course was produced by Cavua from a public-domain text.
Skills this course leaves you with.
- Explain Descartes’ method of doubt and its role in the Meditations
- Analyze the wax example and what it argues about perception and knowledge
- Evaluate the arguments for the existence of God presented in the text
- Distinguish between mind and body in Descartes’ dualist framework
- Summarize the main objections and replies included with the Meditations
- Interpret how Descartes treats the reliability and limits of the senses
Curriculum
The full table of contents.
Every chapter, every lesson, every topic — laid out before you enroll. Click any chapter to expand it.
- Chapters
- 19
- Lessons
- 36
- Topics
- 85
- 01The thinking self and clear perception
- 02Doubt about sensory ideas and external things
- 03Arithmetic, geometry, and the possibility of deception
- 01Judgments, ideas, and sources of error
- 01Why natural light is more trustworthy than inclination
- 02Objective reality in ideas and causal adequacy
- 03Ideas of God, bodies, angels, and humans
- 01Ideas of men, angels, animals, and bodies
- 02The remaining idea of God
- 01The idea of an infinite substance proves God
- 02Why the idea of God cannot come from myself
- 03The causal chain leads to God
- 04The idea of God as innate
- 05God is no deceiver and the contemplation of divine attributes
- 01God as the source of certainty
- 02Error as privation and finite understanding
- 03Will, freedom, and the cause of error
- 04Free will, judgment, and the cause of error
- 05Avoiding error through clear and distinct perception
- 01Ideas of material things and mathematical certainty
- 02The ontological proof from a clear idea of God
- 03God as the ground of certainty and science
- 01Existence of corporeal beings
- 02Imagination versus pure intellection
- 03Imagination as distinct from mind
- 01Imagination, sense, and corporeal existence
- 01Why sensory ideas seemed trustworthy
- 02Reasons for doubting the senses
- 01Clear and distinct perception and the mind-body distinction
- 02Corporeal beings and the reliability of sensory ideas
- 03Nature, mind-body union, and the limits of sense
- 04Errors in natural appetite and sickly judgment
- 01Clock and body as machines
- 02Real error of nature in the compound body and mind
- 03Mind distinct from body
- 01Nerves as ropes transmitting motion
- 02How pain and thirst arise in the brain
- 03Why human senses can be deceived
- 01Sensory deception and bodily preservation
- 02Distinguishing waking from dreams
- 03Human life and particular errors
- 01Thomas Hobbes’s objections to the Meditations
- 01Objections made against the foregoing Meditations
- 01Doubt about dreams and waking sense
- 02Purpose of the skeptical arguments
- 01Mind, thought, and substance
- 01Distinction between the thinker and thought
- 02Modes of thought as inseparable from the self
- 01Imagination versus conception of the mind
- 02Ratiocination and the meaning of words
- 01Ideas of man, chimera, angel, and God
- 02Descartes’s use of the word idea
- 01Superadded forms of thought: wills, affections, and judgments
- 01How the idea of God is received
- 02Reply on the idea of God and the soul
- 01Astronomical arguments and the idea of the Sun
- 01Objective reality in ideas of substances and God
- 02Reply on ideas, reality, and degrees of being
- 01God as infinite, independent, omniscient, almighty creator
- 02Innate ideas and the faculty of producing them
- 01Argument from the idea of God
- 02Reply on God's inconceivability and the demonstration
- 01Error as a defect, not a real being
- 02Freedom of will and the cause of error
- 01Assent to clear perception and the will
- 01Against the Fifth Meditation on material essence
- 01Objection: God's deception and the existence of bodies
- 02Reply: deception incompatible with divine nature
- 01Dreams and memory of past actions
- 02Knowledge of waking and the true God
- 01Classical, theological, and legal folio books
- 02Controversial divinity, sermons, and law reference works
- 03Poetry, practical manuals, and school texts
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