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Descartes: Discourse on Method | |||
2007 • 978-1-58510-259-4 • paper • 98 pages • 6 x 9 • $12.95 | About the Authors | Table of Contents | Preface | Review | |||
Description This Focus Philosophical Library edition includes a new translation of Descartes' seminal discourse, with an original essay by Richard Kennington. This text is designed to provide the student with a close translation, notes, and a glossary of key terms, facilitating access to ideas as they originally were presented and helping to make the translator's work transparent.
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Richard Kennington (1921-1999) was a professor of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University and The Catholic University of America. His teaching was centered largely on seventeenth-century thinkers, primarily Bacon and Descartes, but included also Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, and Spinoza. He was a serious scholar of ancient and contemporary thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Heidegger, on whom he frequently lectured. A collection of his writings, On Modern Origins, traces the transition from a classical, largely speculative tradition in philosophy to the new meaning of nature and theory that characterizes modern philosophy and science. Pamela Kraus teaches at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Frank Hunt teaches at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They are coeditors of Richard Kennington, On Modern Origins: Essays in Early Modern Philosophy (Lexington Press, 2004).
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The Discourse on Method (1637) is a brief writing that serves as a "preface" to three scientific essays (the Optics, the Geometry, and the Meteorology). Of the writings of René Descartes (1596-1650), it is the most widely read and is often assigned in university courses, both graduate and undergraduate, and across various disciplines—humanities, history, literature, rhetoric, history of science—as well as philosophy. Its popularity is in part a consequence of its author’s renown. Descartes’s singular contributions to philosophy, mathematics, and physics place him among the luminaries of his time. He simplified and augmented the power of mathematics through his discovery of analytic geometry; he formulated an account of nature as matter, and of matter as having qualities primarily geometrical in character, rendering it susceptible of mathematical treatment; he enumerated three laws of nature, by which all motions whatsoever are governed, inspiring a line of development to Isaac Newton; he redefined the soul, bequeathing us the notion of mind or consciousness, a domain marked off from that of body or matter; he made prominent a conception of philosophy in which this endeavor to understand the whole of things required prior reflection on and evaluation of the cognitive powers; and he thereby established the good of inquiry as accessible to many rather than restricted to the province of a few, and as beneficial for mankind rather than directed beyond human capability. The Discourse on Method succinctly describes all these contributions and their relation to one another.
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Descartes: Discourse on Method
