The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Meditations by Rene Descartes. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List.
Meditations is only the first part of a two part work. The second part compiles the objections and replies that Descartes received to his original manuscript of Meditations, which he sent out to a few colleagues. Within the text, Descartes recommends reading both before making any assumptions about the work. I personally only wanted to read Meditations, so I opted to read a condensed version of the Objections and Replies, reducing the 300 pages down to about 35. Anyway my feeling on the work of Meditations did not change. In general, the work is written in a very abstract way, where one has to reread the sentence several times just to understand what Descartes is trying to say. During the times that I can actually understand his point, I found that he makes a lot of sense. He postulates that if he can make it seem as if nothing existed then he could prove that everything exists; based mostly on the fact that he is a being capable of thought. Most of this I could follow and I would agree with. Although I found his proof on the existence of God rather circular, as several of the objections also said, and I never saw anything in his writing that proved otherwise. In general a pretty interesting work, but I would not be likely to recommend it to anyone. As for the Objections and Replies, I couldn't find anything in there worth reading that would expand on the original work. The objections were interesting but Descartes' replies seemed almost nonsensical.
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