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Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
Meditations on First Philosophy is considered by many scholars to be the starting point of modern Western philosophy. The meditations are a series of philosophical reflections in which Descartes methodically examines the nature of knowledge, reality, and the self. The work was written during the Scientific Revolution and took part in the emergence of new ways of thinking. In this one brief work, Descartes turned key Aristotelian doctrines upside down and framed many of the questions that philosophers would debate for centuries to come. While we can trace Descartes’s enormous influence to the development of mind-body dualism and modern skepticism, he also provided the Cartesian Circle, the Wax Argument, as well as his theories of ideas, of body, and of perception—all of which became important seeds for philosophical debate.
Principles of Philosophy (1644)
Descartes intended Principles of Philosophy to be his magnum opus—the synthesis of all his theories in physics and philosophy divided into four parts. Part I is the only part of the work that we, today, would call “philosophy.” It is an account of Descartes’s epistemology and his metaphysics. The other three parts of the work deal with Descartes’s natural philosophy, or what we would call “science.” Descartes Principles of Philosophy intended as a coherent picture of the entire “tree” of human knowledge, which he hoped would serve as a textbook should his work ever be taught at the universities.
Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1701)
Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Regulae ad directionem ingenii in Latin) is a work by René Descartes that was published posthumously. It is described in a section of summary and analysis in the SparkNotes Guide Selected Works of René Descartes.
