Noted linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky refers to Descartes’s Meditations as propaganda. He has a point. Descartes wrote the Meditations as a kind of insurance policy. He was all too aware of Galileo’s political difficulties; the Italian had recently gotten himself in some hot water because his writings about heliocentrism rankled among church elite. And Descartes was not about to go down that road. So, he penned the Meditations, basically covering his posterior by making it clear God was included in his analysis, which I will elucidate below.

Despite Chomsky’s comment, I feel the Meditations are a valuable contribution to the philosophy of the mind. In my undergraduate classes, we have a good time discussing Descartes’s piece of wax and all that this illustration invites.

In this brief essay, I wish to run through why Descartes wrote the Meditations, and then I would like to provide a primer on the six meditations contained therein.[1]

Descartes has three discernible motives in play while writing the Meditations. These motives can be considered as personal, political, and philosophical. The personal motive is that Descartes was a devout believer and sought to include God in his metaphysical system. The political motive was to, as mentioned, keep himself out of trouble and not suffer the same difficulties Galileo had. His philosophical motive, on the other hand, was to rescue the mind (or soul) from the prevailing mechanical view of the world.

If the mind was subsumed into the mechanical, then it too would merely exist as part of the clockwork of reality. In other words, freedom of will and thought would disappear, and mind would be no different than one’s kidneys or circulatory system. (It must be borne in mind that philosophers and scientists of this era subscribed to the mechanical philosophy, where humans, animals, plants, and the planets were viewed as basically gears in a machine.) Descartes wished for the mind to exist in its own metaphysical department, as it were.

If the mind was subsumed into the mechanical, then it too would merely exist as part of the clockwork of reality. 

In addition to the three motives, we must also bear in mind the predominant philosophical worldview that prevailed for centuries and still did in seventeenth-century Europe. This view was that of scholasticism.

Scholasticism was the medieval school of thought that had been dominant throughout Europe at the time. This movement, also referred to as the School Men, emphasized Aristotle and was tantamount to theology with some Aristotelian thought stirred in.

It must be kept in mind that there was not much Plato to read in Europe until the fifteenth century. When the works of Plato were finally transmitted and flooded Europe, many Renaissance scientists, artists, and intellectuals became quite enthusiastic about Plato’s thought. Descartes can be viewed as a member of “Team Plato” as well as part of the …

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