Discourse on the Method
Of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences
René Descartes 1637
A short, personal account tells how one thinker doubted everything and rebuilt his knowledge from the ground up. The one thing he cannot doubt gives the book its famous line: I think, therefore I am.
75 pages 1h 28m reading time
- A founding text of modern philosophy.
- Resolves to doubt everything that can be doubted, then rebuild knowledge only on what is certain.
- Finds one certainty that survives doubt, "I think, therefore I am," one of the most famous lines in philosophy.
- Its method of breaking problems into parts and reasoning step by step helped shape the Scientific Revolution.
- Its geometry appendix helped found analytic geometry (algebra applied to shapes), the basis of the graphs we still call Cartesian.
Shaped by Galileo's trial
After the Church condemned Galileo in 1633, Descartes held back his book on physics and published this instead.
Published without his name
It first appeared in Leiden, in the Dutch Republic, with no author's name on the title page.
Written in French, not Latin
He chose French over Latin, the language of scholars, so ordinary readers could follow his reasoning.
Born in a heated room
He says his key ideas came to him on a winter day alone in a stove-heated room in Germany.
Translated from French by John Veitch 1850