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 LMU in Munich, online at historyof philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about Descartes's Meditations with Gary Hatfield,

who is Cybert Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hello, Gary.

Nice to be here, Peter.

Thanks for having me on.

Thank you so much for coming on.

It's an honor to have a very accomplished expert on the meditations to talk to us about this famous text.

Let's start by talking about just how it fits into his body of work more generally.

When and why did he write the meditations?

Okay, good.

One way to approach this kind of question is to

think about Descartes' own intellectual development, but also to think about that intellectual

development within the context that he was writing. So Descartes began earnest work in around 1620,

and during the 1620s, he discovered the sign law of refraction, and he solved

the Pappas Locus problem and sort of invented analytic geometry. Now, I say this, because I think

in understanding Descartes, we have to realize that he was a mathematician and a scientist

before he was a position.

So even during that same 1620s, he wrote the beginnings of this work called the Rules

for the Direction of the Mind, which was a methodological work, and talked about methodology

in mathematics and in optics and other areas of natural philosophy, but didn't have really

worked out metaphysics and didn't have a notion of a universal physics that was a coherent

...