"Discourse on the Method" (full name: Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason
and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences by French philosopher René Descartes may very well be the first book of modern philosophy and a
theoretical basis for modern science. It is the predecessor of Descartes'
seminal work "Meditations on the First Philosophy" which is considered
as one of the most important books in the history of philosophy.
Descartes' "Discourse on the
Method" is groundbreaking in tackling the problem of the manner in which
we acquire knowledge and attribute truth to it. Descartes problematizes our
relationship with reality by opposing a perceiving
subject with a perceived object. This opposition is new to philosophy (at
Descartes' times) that never thought of man and the theoretical validly of his
judgments of the material world as a problem (philosophy after Descartes has
lost its innocence, and not for the last time). This, for Descartes, warrants
the consideration of how we know our knowledge of the world to be valid, and
his answer is that the validly of our method of acquiring knowledge will ensure
the validity of that knowledge. The most basic of the rules of that method is,
according to Descartes', "never to
accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such." (Discourse on the Method, Part 2). This, in essence, is
what we call today scientific thought which was, to a large extent, born
in Descartes' "Discourse on the Method".
"Discourse on the Method" is divided (like
Meditations) into six parts. Here you can find short and essential summaries of
each of the chapters.
More about Descartes:
The Philosophy of Renè Descartes - overviewMeditations on the First Philosophy- essential summary
Meditations on the First Philosophy- summary by chapter
Descartes' proofs of God in Meditations
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