Series
A five-part walk through the Meditations, 25 minutes at a time.
Originally prepared for Academia.edu, this is the clearest short introduction to Descartes you will find: the method of doubt, the cogito, the proof of God, the trustworthiness of reason, and the two problems Descartes left the rest of us.
Start with
24:55Opening a five-part lecture series prepared for Academia.edu, Dr. Firestone situates Descartes at the turn from metaphysics to epistemology, where tradition and authority are out and free, mathematical, critical thinking is in, and previews the 'hourglass-shaped' argument of the Meditations.
Lecture-style series build on themselves. Numbered so you can follow the thread.
24:55Opening a five-part lecture series prepared for Academia.edu, Dr. Firestone situates Descartes at the turn from metaphysics to epistemology, where tradition and authority are out and free, mathematical, critical thinking is in, and previews the 'hourglass-shaped' argument of the Meditations.
24:55Walking through the method of doubt and the evil-demon hypothesis, Dr. Firestone shows how Descartes arrives at 'I think, therefore I am' as the Archimedean point of knowledge and likens the six Meditations to six days of creation that end with a vision of the human person as mind and body.
24:48Meditations Three and Four move from the idea of infinity to a proof of God and then to the trustworthiness of reason; Dr. Firestone argues that Descartes' account of error as the will outrunning the intellect contains the most important sentence in the Western canon and the essence of critical thinking.
24:08In Meditations Five and Six Descartes uses clear and distinct ideas to secure God, the external world, and the mind-body union; Dr. Firestone addresses the charge of the Cartesian circle and the mind-body problem that his philosophy leaves behind.
20:29A concise review of the whole arc of the Meditations (doubt, the thinking self, God, trustworthy reason, the external world, and the composite human being) and of the two problems, the mind-body relation and circularity, that Descartes bequeathed to modern philosophy.
5 episodesA working definition, and why philosophy needs faith, logic, ethics, and myth.
3 episodesThe thinker he chose to sit under for thirty years.
6 episodesSix episodes on what dreams are, from Freud and Jung to Genesis and Revelation.
