Reddit mentions of Discourse on Method (Hackett Classics)

I would really really REALLY like to have them!! In exchange, I have

1. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Penguin Classics paperback.
   
2. Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture, edited by Stephen Segal. Hard cover.
   
3. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Paperback.
   
4. Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago by Alex Kotlowitz. Hard cover.
   
5. Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons. Paperback.
   
6. Crownless: Tales of the Banished by Katie Appenheimer.
   
7. Wild Animus by Rich Shapero. This is an advance copy. It includes several CDs (music, not the a recording of the book) as well as the book. I can post pictures if asked.
   
8. Pragmatism: The Classic Writings edited by H.S. Thayer. It includes Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Clarence Irving Lewis, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead.
   
9. Discourse on Method by Rene Descartes, translated by Donald Cress. Third Edition. It's this one.
   
10. Custom edition version of The West: Encounters and Transformations by Brian Levack, Edward Muir, and Meredith Veldman. I took a class that used this textbook, and my professor special ordered copies that are only Chapters 9 - 19 of the original text. It covers European history from High Medieval - mid-18th Century. If you want more information, I can write out the chapter titles or whatever you need.

Mike Rugnetta made a few stretches or mistakes in explaining Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" yet the corrections still could have been used to explain the misuse of quotes or the way meaning is lost through translation both literally and through people and time.

The first is error Rugnetta mentions 'I think, therefore I am' doesn't mean I think therefore I have a body, it means I think and therefore there must be stuff, stuff which I'm comfortable labeling me thinking all them thoughts." It would have been better to quote Descartes himself (Yes, I will get to how Descartes is speaking as the I next) explicitly stating, "this 'I,' that is to say, the soul through which I am what I am." (Does Popeye owes Descartes royalties?) Thus the I is the soul and in a secular way a "placeholder". This may seem minimal but would a placeholder continue to exist if the body were removed? Descartes say this is separate from the body and thus continues despite a body being( if the body never was because "Descartes” says I is a soul not a physical thing.) The use of the word “soul” is perfect as today it connotates a religious, in but outer body thing and that is what Descartes is writing about in that Part IV of Discourse on Method.

Say Whaaaa?

Yes. Not only is this a portion of Descartes’ search for the truth (knowledge) but Part IV is about proving “the existence of God and of the human soul, which are the foundations of his metaphysics.” (This quote is from the beginning of the discourse and in in italics. I don’t know if this was from an early editor or friend or pompous Rene Descartes himself). He is constantly drowning the reader with I because he is expelling to the reader how and why he arrived at writing the Discourse. When you learn a little about Descartes’, you suddenly see how parallel the Discourse is to his early life. Thus to say the cogito’s I isn’t really a person speaking” is to ignore Descarte’s definition of I as the soul and thus a person with or without a body.

This leads me to correct Rugnetta’s claim that the Discourse’s avoidance of “you, us or we” was an omittance of the other yet applicable to the other. Descartes is completely redefining philosophy and thus the pre-science days of science. At this time, you were taught to listen, read, memorize and repeat. Scholarship was not thinking critically as we view it today (or some of us) but of absorbing the scholastics. Descartes found much of this during his youth most unsettling when he attended a Jesuit high school which taught the opposite: independent thought. There he began to seek the new topics that were banging on the gates to Universities such as mathematics and later on would conclude he needed to start anew and wipe all predisposed through teaching and get at the essential building blocks: I think, therefore I am.

Why did I tell you all that? To go to the next misused quote, I’m sure there’s something in all of Descartes’ life you could have connected the two (I don’t know much of Sartre so good luck). With No exit, I think there might have been a way to tie it in.

Anyway… Thanks Mike. Thanks for making me pull out Descartes’ Discourse on Method (Hackett, 3rd Ed), The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin (Uni. Chicago), and my notes from “The Age of the Scientific Revolution”, a course studying the 1500s and up. Today we call it the Scientific Revolution but to those living at the time they called it philosophy, natural philosophy, and mathematics. Wait, I take back that sarcastic thanks and replace it with a sincere thank you. It was enjoyable to reread sections of the old course material. Made me miss that course actually. Now why the hell did I spend an hour writing this crap?!! WHo'll read it?! Psh!