nectar
Register
Author

Chapters: 6 Ideas: 46

Visit original source

Discourse on Method

René Descartes 1637

How can we learn to judge reliably? A search for reliable judgment through orderly inquiry, doubt, and careful examination of inherited beliefs. It connects a method for reasoning with provisional rules for action, arguments about mind and God, explanations of nature, and experiments that can advance useful knowledge.

Preview

  1. Idea 4

    Books and histories offer selected encounters with other minds and times. Because even faithful histories omit ordinary circumstances, treating exceptional stories as complete guides to life can produce unrealistic plans.

  2. Idea 21

    After doing what lies within reach, work on desires rather than demanding command over fortune. Satisfaction requires discipline about what can be obtained, not the assumption that every external outcome must yield to one’s will.

  3. Idea 26

    The step from a thinking self to an immaterial mind rests on distinguishing what can be doubted. If bodily existence can be set aside while thinking cannot, the resulting argument identifies thought as the self’s essence; it does not begin from a bodily observation.

Contents
  1. Learning to Examine Beliefs7 ideas
  2. Four Rules for Orderly Inquiry8 ideas
  3. Acting While Judgment Is Unsettled7 ideas
  4. Doubt and the Foundations of Certainty8 ideas
  5. Explaining Nature and Embodied Thought5 ideas
  6. Experiments, Communication, and Further Discovery11 ideas