I will now close my eyes, I will stop my ears, I will turn away my senses from their objects, I will even efface from my consciousness all the images of corporeal things; or at least, because this can hardly be accomplished, I will consider them as empty and false; and thus, holding converse only with myself, and closely examining my nature, I will endeavor to obtain by degrees a more intimate and familiar knowledge of myself. I am a thinking (conscious) thing... although the things which I perceive or imagine are perhaps nothing at all apart from me, I am nevertheless assured that those modes of consciousness which I call perceptions and imaginations, in as far only as they are modes of consciousness, exist in me.
-from Meditation III: "Of God: That He Exists"
Sometimes called the father of modern philosophy, French mathematician, scientist, and writer RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650) continues to have a deeply profound impact on our modern world. His thinking on how the mind works and what is it capable of has profoundly impacted our understanding of ourselves-he summed up his philosophy with the phrase "I think, therefore I am," which still thrills us-and his influence extends to our own experiments with modern computing and artificial intelligence.
This concise discourse on doubt and the nature of truth was written in Latin and first published in 1641 with the subtitle In which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated. Here, Descartes considers:
Those Things That Can Be Called into Doubt
The Nature of the Human Mind: That It Is Better Known Than the Body
God, That He Exists
The True and the False
The Essence of Material Things
The Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body
Scottish poet, philosopher, and historian JOHN VEITCH (1829-1894) translated Meditations into English in 1852-this is a replica of the 1901 edition.
