Bøker av Rene Descartes

The Passions of the Soul is Descartes's greatest contribution to the understanding of the union of mind and body. It discusses the emotions and their place in human life. This volume also includes both sides of the correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, crucial to the genesis of the work, and Part I of The Principles of Philosophy.

First published in 1923, this volume contains Descartes' Discours de la methode in the original French. A short editorial introduction in English is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the works of Descartes and the development of rationalism.

No text has defined the self-understanding of the present time like Jean-Francois Lyotard's La condition postmoderne, Rapport sur le savoir (1979). But few participants in the dialogue between the moderns and the postmoderns can claim to understand exactly what "e;modernity"e; is. Yet one can hardly understand "e;post-modernism"e; without adequately understanding what it is supposed to supersede. Thus there also arises one of the biggest difficulties in understanding postmodernism itself.A good way to try to meet this need is by rereading, now more carefully than ever, the book to which Stephen Toulmin refers, in Cosmopolis, The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990), as one of "e;. . . the founding documents of modern thought . . ."e; (p.14). It is Rene Descartes' Discours de la methode/Discourse on the Method (1637), which is both a classic of modern philosophy and the crucial source book of modernity.This unique edition of the Discours/Discourse contains an improved version of the original French text of Adam and Tannery, a new English translation as literal as possible and as liberal as necessary, an interpretive essay contextualizing the text historically and philosophically, an extensive bibliography, and a comprehensive index of Cartesian terminology.The edition is not only for advanced students and teachers of philosophy as well as of related disciplines such as literary and cultural criticism, but also for all those "e;human beings of good sense"e; motivated by an interest in uncovering "e;the hidden agenda of modernity"e;. It is thus also intended as a timely contribution to the modern-postmodern debate.

Considered a foundational text in modern philosophy, the Meditations on First Philosophy presents numerous powerful arguments that to this day influence debates in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of religion.

Descartes's A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences marks a watershed in European thought; in it, the author provides an informal intellectual autobiography in the vernacular for a non-specialist readership, sweeps away all previous philosophical traditions, and sets out in brief his radical new philosophy.

In Descartes's Meditations, the thinker rejects all his former beliefs in the quest for new certainties. He develops new conceptions of body and mind to create a new science of nature. This new translation includes a wide-ranging, accessible introduction, notes and full selections from the Objections and Replies.

Volumes I and II provide a completely new translation of the philosophical works of Descartes, based on the best available Latin and French texts. Volume III contains 207 of Descartes' letters, over half of which have not been translated into English before. It incorporates, in its entirety, Anthony Kenny's celebrated translation of selected philosophical letters, first published in 1970. In conjunction with Volumes I and II it is designed to meet the widespread demand for a comprehensive, accurate and authoritative edition of Descartes' philosophical writings in clear and readable modern English.

Based on the new and much acclaimed two-volume Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes by Cottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch, this anthology of essential texts contains the most important and widely studied of those writings, including the Discourse and Meditations and substantial extracts from the Regulae, Optics, Principles, Objectives and Replies, Comments on a Broadsheet, and Passions of the Soul. In clear, readable, modern English, with a full text and running references to the standard Franco-Latin edition of Descartes, this book is planned as the definitive one-volume reader for all English-speaking students of Descartes.

Descartes' The World offers the most comprehensive vision of the nature of the world since Aristotle, and is crucial for an understanding of his later writings, in particular the Meditations and Principles of Philosophy. Above all, it provides an insight into how Descartes conceived of natural philosophy before he started to reformulate his doctrines in terms of a sceptically driven epistemology. Of its two parts, the Treatise on Light introduced the first comprehensive, quantitative version of a mechanistic natural philosophy, supplying a theory of matter, a physical optics, and a cosmology. The Treatise on Man provided the first comprehensive mechanist physiology. This volume also includes translations of material important for an understanding of the work: related sections from the Dioptrics and the Meteors, and an English translation of the complete text of The Description of the Human Body.

These two 1985 volumes provide a translation of the philosophical works of Descartes, based on the best available Latin and French texts. They were intended to replace the only reasonably comprehensive selection of his works in English, by Haldane and Ross, first published in 1911.

The great work that founded analytical geometry. Includes the original French text, Descartes' own diagrams, and the definitive Smith-Latham translation. "The greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences." -- John Stuart Mill.

Rene Descartes has been described as the "father" of modern philosophy. This selection of Descartes' writings attempt to answer central questions surrounding self, God, free-will and knowledge, using the science of thought as opposed to received wisdom based on the tenets of faith.

Texts translated from the French and Latin serve to illustrate the context of the writing of Descartes' Meditations.

This is the second of a new two-volume edition of the works of Descartes in Penguin Classics. This volume is designed for students who approach Descartes from the point of view of his philosophy of science. Includes DISCOURSE ON METHOD, the most accessible and well-known of his discussions of scientific method; the first seven chapters of the earlier, unpublished work, THE WORLD; as well as a selection of Descartes' correspondence and his replies to his critics.

Of all the works of the man claimed by many as the father of modern philosophy, the MEDITATIONS, first published in 1641, must surely be Rene Descartes' masterpiece. This volume consists of not only a new translation of the original Latin text and the expanded objections and replies, but also includes selected correspondence and other metaphysical writings from the period 1641-49.

This bilingual edition of Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is aimed both specifically at serious students and professors of philosophy, and generally at anyone motivated by a strong philosophical interest.

Includes the translation by Haldane and Ross of Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy", an introduction by Tweyman and six articles indicating the diversity of scholarly opinion on the topic of method in Descartes' philosophy.

Rene Descartes was a central figure in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In his Discourse on Method he outlined the contrast between mathematics and experimental sciences, and the extent to which each one can achieve certainty. Drawing on his own work in geometry, optics, astronomy and physiology, Descartes developed the hypothetical method that characterizes modern science, and this soon came to replace the traditional techniques derived from Aristotle. Many of Descartes' most radical ideas - such as the disparity between our perceptions and the realities that cause them - have been highly influential in the development of modern philosophy.