Nonfiction · 1637
Discourse on the Method
Of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences
René Descartes · translated by John Veitch
“I think, therefore I am.” René Descartes’s short account of how he came to doubt everything he had been taught and to rebuild knowledge from that single certainty was published anonymously in Leiden in 1637, in French rather than Latin so that anyone could read it.
The book is short, and half of it is autobiography: the schooling that left him dissatisfied, the winter he spent shut in a stove-heated room in Germany working out a method, the years of travel that followed. The method itself is four rules, of which the first — accept nothing that is not clearly and distinctly true — is the one that did the damage. The doubt is not scepticism but a tool, and the only thing it leaves standing is the thinker himself.
This edition uses the English translation by John Veitch (1850) and gives the six parts complete, with Descartes’s prefatory note.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of Essential Philosophy.
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About the author
1596–1650 · 17th Century
René Descartes (1596–1650) was born in Touraine, educated by the Jesuits at La Flèche, served as a soldier, and from 1628 lived mostly in the Dutch Republic, where he wrote the Discourse on the Method (1637), the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and the Principles of Philosophy (1644). He died in Stockholm, where he had gone to teach Queen Christina.
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