https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/descartes/1639/meditations.htm
In Meditation 2 of Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes describes a piece of wax in what has become known as the wax experiment.
Write a short essay not exceeding in which you discuss the wax experiment as a rationalist or empiricist exercise.
Descartes Resources
Rene Descartes is the most important and influential rationalist philosopher after Plato. His Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy are among the most cited, studied, and quoted texts in the Western Canon. Both of them are short and surprisingly accessible, so I encourage all of you who aspire to be the smartest person in the room to read them in their entirety.
We will be reading the first two meditations of Meditations on First Philosophy together in this module. Many people consider them to be the seminal texts in modern philosophy, containing Descartes’ description of systematic doubt as well as his stupendously famous Cogito: “I think; therefore, I am.”
There is enough material available on Descartes to nearly fill the Library of Babel, and I hope that you will do some research of your own and share some links with us on “Discussion 2.” Here are some to get you started:
1. This is a very good start on the whole Descartes project: https://iep.utm.edu/descarte/ (Links to an external site.)
1a. Very complete analysis of hyperbolic doubt: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/
2. Even more: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/
3. Straight up college lecture (You know you want it.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncEoWxsnXyc
4. YouTube Descartes, but still serious and informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iGjiSbEp9c
5. How Descartes gave us The Matrix films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLKrmw906TM
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