Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings

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This is the Penguin edition. It includes multiple works by Descartes: (0) an introduction that gives some background information, (1) Meditations on First Philosophy, (2) Objections and Replies, a text that gives replies to common objections against his Meditations, (3) Principles of Philosophy, basically a summarized version of (1), (4) Descartes’ correspondence, which is a collection of letters with people asking him questions regarding his work, and finally (5) comments on a certain manifesto, which is a rebuttal against the work of philosophers of his time who Descartes thought had misunderstood him.

I really like how the text is written. I don’t know how much that is due to this particular translation or Descartes himself, but it is very readable and I enjoy his stylistic choices. Content-wise, I like that he first questions all assumptions, basically tearing down the established worldview before starting again and trying to reconstruct it from the ground up. I like this approach.

Personally, I think this “tear down” is more interesting than the reconstruction, as quite early on I already had a bunch of problems with the reconstruction, so the later parts were less interesting because they depended on earlier parts I had already disagreed with.

I also think it’s really cool to include common objections people had against his work and then provide his direct replies. Often, philosophical works do not take objections this seriously.

Having the Principles of Philosophy as a quick summary of his work is also really nice. I think in general more works should have this structure: first the main philosophical work (i.e., the argument), then a section with common objections, and finally a summary. It makes everything very neat and approachable. The correspondence that Descartes had with Princess Elizabeth was also very cute to read, it gives an interesting view of the time: what people thought, what issues they had, and so on.

Finally, his comment on a manifesto was a really brutal takedown of his opponent. Descartes would have fit right into modern debate culture, in a positive way.