1. What overall literary form does Descartes
give the work?
2. "I have been nourished on letters
since my childhood." What does he mean by this? What are letters?
3. What is Descartes 's
intellectual goal and what practical consequences will it have?
4. What is his opinion of eloquence
(rhetoric) and poetry? Why? What of mathematics? Does he attach value to any
subject dealing with human affairs (history, politics, ethics, law, etc.)?
5. Why does Descartes criticize philosophy?
6. Do you detect a gender bias in Descartes?
Is there any pattern to his likes and dislikes? Is he justified?
7. “I deemed everything that was merely
probable to be well-nigh false?” What could Descartes possibly mean
here? If something is false, then how can it be probable?
8. What did Descartes do after finishing his
schools? In general what do we learn about Descartes’s
life from this essay?
9. What does Descartes say about foreign
travel and its benefits? What did he learn about method from his travels and
his conversations with other people? What was his response?
1. What system of knowledge does Descartes
most revere? That is, what knowledge structure does he take as his own model?
Why?
2. What is Descartes’s
point about the architecture of cities and the systems of laws?
3. What are the four cardinal steps of Descartes 's method? Can you illustrate each one?
4. What role is there for creative
imagination in Descartes 's method?
5. Does Descartes 's
method look profound to you? Or is it obvious, even trivial?
6. What structure of the world is presupposed
by Descartes 's method, assuming that we can indeed
readily apply it to the world?
7. Descartes uses different analogies in this
part of the Discourse to clarify his point. Can you identify them and
reconstruct their structure? What is the point of these analogies (referring to
the beauty of cities and the coherence of legal systems?)
1. What code of conduct does Descartes set
for himself in this part of the work? What are the rules of the provisional
moral code? What is the purpose of this moral code?
2. In his synopsis of the work, D apparently
claims to derive his rules of action from his method, but is this so? What is
going on here?
3. Does it seem plausible that D could derive
value claims (e.g., about the good life and how to live it) by applying his
method to the conception of the physical universe that he sketches in Part V?
Explain. What sources of value would seem to be available to Descartes?
4. What is the purpose of this moral code?
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