THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TITLE OF DESCARTES’ MEDITATIONS
FOOTNOTES
3. As asserted by A. Baillet, La vie de M. Des Cartes, Paris, 1691: repr. La Table Ronde, Paris, 1946, p.171.
4. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Cambridge, 1984, Vol. II, p.1.
5. See my ‘The Demarcation between Metaphysics and other Disciplines in the Thought of Leibniz’, R.S. Woolhouse (ed.), Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Kluwer, 1988, 133–163, esp. pp. 143–4.
6. The idea that Descartes had a firm sense of his audience, perhaps to the point of insincerity, owes much to Hiram Caton, The Origin of Subjectivity, Yale University Press, 1973.
9. De spiritualibus ascensionibus 45, in Magna bibliotheca patrum, ed. M. de Bigne, 1677.
10. Marcus Aurelius’s Ta eis heauton (‘To Himself’) was first given the title Meditations by Meric Casaubon in his English translation of 1643 — two years after the publication of Descartes’ work, and possibly under its influence.
11. ed. Calveras & Dalmases, Rome: 1969, p. 140.
12. As a piece of educational theory, this has a remarkably modern ring to it: student-centred learning techniques based on a ‘fact-reduced diet.’
13. See my ‘Hobbes and Descartes on the Relation between Language and Consciousness', Synthese 75, 1988, 217-229.
14. Note: We have tantalisingly little evidence as to whether or not Descartes himself actually went through a process of meditation such as he describes. His account of his day in the stove-room at Ulm in 1619 (Discourse II) bears all the marks of fiction, and the date is suspiciously close to that of his messianic dream of founding a new philosophy (cf. Cottingham et al., I.2–5). More likely, he developed his ideas over an extended period while in retreat from social distractions. During the same period there is some evidence (pace Cottingham) that he was trying to make contact with the bizarrely mystical Rosicrucians.
15. See, e.g., Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, University of California Press, 1972; Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, Vol. I, Manchester University Press, 1967, Ch. 4.
17. It is interesting that St. Anselm regarded the ontological argument, not as a proof of God’s existence to convince the infidel, but as an explication of his nature to convince the believer.
18. Cottingham et al., II.32; A&T.VII.46.
19. Cottingham et al., I.257–8. This passage is also remarkable for its implication that the universe goes through a series of cycles until all possible configurations of matter have been actualised.
23. Migne, Patrologia Latina 92, 1167–9.
24. A&T, Vol. X, ad fin. figs. 29, 35, 36.