Descartes' Mediations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies Ed. John Cottingham, Cambridge Univ Press, 2007.
Just in case, A Trilingual HTML Edition of Descartes' Meditations can be found HERE
Edited byDavid B. Manley and Charles S. Taylor.
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In Light of the reading try to think about the following questions:
- What is skepticism?
- Is it a “sane” philosophical attitude to approach things around us?
- What is the role of skepticism in Descartes’ first Meditation?
- What is an illusion (spend some time to have fun with the Visual Illusion Gallery!)?
- Try to think of cases when your senses mislead you. Do these situations have anything in common? What does it mean that they “mislead” you? What can we conclude from this about our senses?
- Can you be deceived that you are reading this question now?
- Do we have a background of certain, true beliefs?
- What is the difference between dream and reality? Think about your dreams. How do they look like?
- If everything is a dream, would it make sense to talk of “dreams”?
- Can we dream of dreaming?
- When you dream, can you ask “Am I dreaming”? If so, Would that be different from dreaming of asking “Am I dreaming”? Why?
- Are dreams necessarily unconscious?
- How do you know that you are not a brain in a vat (see John Pollock, “A Brain in a Vat,” in Feinberg and Shafer-Landau, Reason & Responsibility, pp. 137-138)? If you were a brain in a vat and you claimed: “I am a brain in a vat!”, which state of affairs your utterance would refer to?
- When do we know that a mathematical statement is true (and indubitable)? Consider Goldbach's conjecture: "Every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes." This statement has not been proved yet. What should we conclude, now, about its truth?
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