Meditations on First Philosophy

⚖The case for it

Meditation One takes everything apart, and readers say it reads closer to a thriller than to logic. Then the cogito in Meditation Two, the one move that has survived every objection thrown at it in four centuries. The wax melting by the fire is the demonstration people remember, because it is the one concrete thing in the book. Descartes writes in first person, “confessions, almost like journal entries,” a man thinking aloud rather than lecturing. The Objections and Replies are genuinely funny, and readers enjoy “the beef between these oldass virgin philosophers.” Under a hundred pages.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The engine runs out by Meditation Three, when he needs God and the reasoning turns circular; readers name the Cartesian Circle and say the proofs are “begging the question.” After that it is “paper-thin beyond Meditation Two,” with one reader counting “only about five pages of real skepticism” in the whole thing. The mind-body argument asks you to accept that clearly conceiving two things apart proves they can exist apart. The scholastic vocabulary trips anyone without medieval philosophy. And critics say he is “working backwards from conclusions he needs to be true.”

— the honest librarian

2h

honest hours

3

sittings