Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LM online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Perchance to Dream, Descartes' Sceptical Method.

Some years ago, I attended a performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet in London.

Watching it, I was struck by the unusual

challenge it must pose to the actors. It's packed with familiar quotations, to the point that it seems

almost impossible to make the dialogue seem fresh. It's no easy feat to deliver the line,

to be or not to be, or, alas, poor York, and get the audience to feel as if Hamlet is saying this

only just having thought of it. What was once a newly written play has over time become something

more like a greatest hits compilation. Rereating Descartes' meditations, I had a similar sensation.

Once original, but now cliches are clear and distinct ideas, the evil demon

that may be feeding us false beliefs, the contemplation of a piece of wax, imagining that people in

the street are automata hidden under cloaks and hats, and of course, co-gito ergo sum,

I think, therefore I am quite possibly the most famous single sentence in all of philosophy.

A pleasing trivia fact is that these exact words do not appear in the meditations,

though they do in other writings by Descartes. Still, the Kogito argument does play a key role,

or even the key role in the meditations, if that is it is really an argument.

We'll come back to that.

I think that comparison to Hamlet is an apt one, even beyond the over-familiarity of the text,

because a big part of the extraordinary success of the meditations is its literary artistry.

It has the gripping quality of investigative drama. Descartes

himself in the role of The Meditator, a kind of philosophical private detective who's going

to solve the biggest mysteries of all without leaving his study. Through incidental examples,

...