READING ORDER
Cogito?
Nine research chats on Descartes, each reviewed against your library, set in the order that makes them one argument
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Nine chats, reviewed · 10 pages
The Descartes Project
Nine research chats on Descartes, each reviewed against the library, set in the order that makes them one argument.
Each page reviews one research chat against the literature: an abstract, the question, a works table, part openers, text panels with page-numbered quotations, an internal audit, and a map of the argument.
The reviews are candid about what the chats got wrong. They are reliable on argument and less reliable on locators — a quotation assigned to the wrong objector or the wrong Replies, a paraphrase presented as a quotation. Where that happens, the page says so.
Start here
The reading order, the threads that run through the nine, and what the reviews found.
The doubt
How far the doubt reaches, what it is answerable to, and what it cannot touch.
REVIEW
What Is Wrong with Hyperbolic Doubt?
Four centuries of objections to the method of doubt and the evil genius — sorted by what each one actually attacks
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REVIEW
The Immunity of the Cogito
By what argument, exactly, is “I am thinking” kept out of the demon’s reach, and where does the immunity leak on the way to “I exist”?
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97 KB
REVIEW
Derrida and the Cogito
The reader who defends Descartes against Foucault, and then asks what the certainty of the instant would need in order to found anything
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83 KB
The cogito
The first certainty reconstructed: as inference, as performance, and on the substance theory.
REVIEW
Dicker’s Reconstruction
The cogito rebuilt on the substance theory: where its concepts come from, how its six steps run, why they fail, and why a stream of thoughts cannot supply the continuity the wax supplies
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REVIEW
The Two Tiers of Cartesian First Certainty
“Thinking is occurring” and “this is a doubting”: does the cogito’s immunity pass from the first to the second, and has anyone said that it does not?
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87 KB
REVIEW
Hintikka’s Performative Cogito
Inference or performance: what Hintikka argued in 1962, what his critics say he argued, and why the field settled on a hybrid
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Reading Descartes
How he has been studied, what the quarrel was in French, and what stands before the cogito.
REVIEW
Before the Cogito
Menn’s Descartes and Augustine , the instructions written for reading it, and what Augustine’s si fallor, sum is and is not
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REVIEW
The Missing Half of the Quarrel
What of Ferdinand Alquié’s Descartes reached English, and what the Royaumont exchange with Gueroult actually said
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113 KB
REVIEW
The Cogito Between Two Disciplines
How Descartes has been studied, how he ought to be, and where legitimate reconstruction turns into projection
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