Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen
The Defense of Reason in Descartes's Meditations
Chapter One
Introduction
In the Theaetetus, Plato describes thinking as a conversation conducted by
the soul with itself. This has sometimes been taken as a reason for
admiring his use of the dialogue form. Koyre goes so far, in fact, as to
maintain that "the dialogue is the form parexcellence for philosophic
investigation, because thought itself, at least for Plato, is a 'dialogue
the soul holds with itself.'" But a dialogue is not a conversation with
oneself. It is a conversation with other people. If thinking is indeed
internal discourse, then dialogue can hardly be the ideally appropriate
literary form in which to convey it. A much more appropriate vehicle is
the meditation, in which an author represents the autonomous give and take
of his own systematic reflections.
Moral and religious meditations were published before the seventeenth
century, but Descartes was the first to use the form in an exclusively
metaphysical work. During his lifetime he published three ma ... read full excerpt from Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes's "Meditations" ebook
