One of the things I want to do this semester is to work my way through the first meditation of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy paragraph by paragraph. The source I will use is here: http://www.wright.edu/cola/descartes/meditation1.html. Go read it!

Here are my intentions:

• I want this to be helpful and/or interesting for community college philosophy students, but I’ll try to keep other readers in mind too.
• I want to keep it bite-sized. I’m only going to look at a paragraph at a time. The problem will be that by chopping the Meditations up into pieces, I may end up missing the overall perspective at times. Hopefully not!
• I’m a little self-conscious about the fact that there are Descartes experts out there; I would be embarrassed to have one of them yell at me because I was wrong! Even though I am not an expert, I’m going to write as honestly as I can about what I think.
• I want to understand Descartes clearly, but I am ready to disagree with him wherever it seems like I should.
• I want to let Descartes’ ideas spur my own ideas. That means I’ll ramble from time to time.

More coming soon …