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Philosophy Books

Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes
Buy now

Meditations on First Philosophy

by René Descartes

Recommendations from our site

“René Descartes is a superb writer who, in his first Meditation (which is the one I’m recommending) takes skepticism—which is an unwillingness to assume anything, a philosophical stance where you question everything—about as far as it can go. Meditations is written as if he is going through a process in real time, he’s imagining himself sitting by a fire taking all the thoughts that he’s had in his past, the different ways of acquiring information, cross-questioning himself about whether he could have been deceived about any of those, and employing what’s come to be known as ‘Cartesian Doubt’. It’s not taking as true anything about which there is the slightest possible doubt. In ordinary life, that’s not a way to behave.” Read more...

Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon

Nigel Warburton, Philosopher

“Descartes wants a God that doesn’t speak, because speaking is tantamount to interfering with the orderly and law-like operations of the world.” Read more...

The best books on Deceit

Dallas Denery, Historian

“Descartes wrote the Meditations in a language that was available to a well-educated person who didn’t have that much Latin. Meditations is not only a classic — it’s easy to find almost anything you want in it — but I also see it as one of the books that you could recruit into a history of the philosophy of information……There are many ways of reading the Meditations. Today Descartes speaks more directly to us if you understand him as the equivalent of an engineer testing a product. Much better to read it that way than suggesting that we are living in The Matrix.“ Read more...

The best books on The Philosophy of Information

Luciano Floridi, Philosopher

“Descartes was educated by Jesuits, and it’s important that they were called meditations because they were meant to be things that people would think through themselves.” Read more...

The best books on Metaphysics

Tim Crane, Philosopher

Our most recommended books

  • Plato's Republic

    Republic
    by Plato

  • On Liberty
    by John Stuart Mill

  • Dialogues and Natural History of Religion
    by David Hume

  • Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • The Nicomachean Ethics
    by Aristotle

  • Middlemarch
    by George Eliot

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