About this course

‘I think, therefore I am’

Or in Latin, ‘cogito, ergo sum’. Or in French, ‘Je pense, donc je suis’.

This is the most famous phrase in Western philosophy and in this course we will be finding out why. As it happens, it doesn’t actually occur in this form in the Meditations. Instead the Meditations uses an alternative formulation:

‘this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind’.

Some people make a big thing about this difference and say that it is very important and later we will consider why this is. As a kind of shorthand, any version of this saying is referred to as the cogito.

For Higher Philosophy you need to study two extracts from the Meditations:

• Meditation One and the first part of Meditation Two, and
• Meditation Three.

People use philosophical texts in more than one way. Some people who are studying various topics in philosophy may use a philosophical text as a source book of arguments or as a way of illustrating a philosophical position. So, for example, students following a course in epistemology may look at the Meditations to see what it says about scepticism. We’ll see what ‘scepticism’ means shortly.

There is nothing wrong in using a philosophical text as a source book of arguments but it does run the risk of giving a distorted impression of what the text actually says. There is a risk of taking arguments out of context or of changing them slightly because that better serves the purpose of the topical study.

The other way of using a philosophical text is to start with the text, put it into its historical context, and to work out what the author was trying to say. This is the approach required by Higher Philosophy. You are expected to ‘gain in-depth knowledge and understanding’ of the specified extracts.

The reason why you need to be aware of this distinction is because textbooks written for a topic-based course may not contain all the information you need when following a text-based course.

To properly understand any historical text we need to find out

WHEN it was written,

WHY it was written,

WHO it was aimed at, and

WHAT literary techniques it is using to get its message across.

However, before we read the text itself we must clarify some philosophical terms and concepts that are needed to understand what the author was trying to do. In particular, we need to understand what is meant by: 

SCEPTICISM,

RATIONALISM, AND

EMPIRICISM.