Lecture on descartes’ metaphysical meditations 1961- 1962 English translation by

English translation

by

Donald JOHNSON

Professor at Santa Monica College

The pages which follow aim to do no more than furnish Propédeutique¹ students with a study tool. They are class notes, hardly reworked. If the object of this course is to introduce philosophy, and its method to comment on Descartes’ Meditations, one would not be able to find here an interpretation in due and proper form of Cartesian thought or the very essence of philosophy. But it appeared that the students’ individual class notes –whether because of the difficulty of the questions, or for diverse material reasons—were by themselves incomplete, sometimes uncertain, and that it was necessary, in order to make of them a study tool that would be reliable, to complete them with each other, correct them in certain places, and at last to clarify them as needed with some new developments. That is what was done here.

It must be added that the work done on Fridays –exercises in textual explication—forms a whole with Wednesday’s class. We have therefore undertaken as well to publish the text of these exercises.

Gérard GRANEL