Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences #347309

Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (French: Discours de la Méthode Pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences) is a philosophical and autobiographical treatise published by René Descartes in 1637. It is best known as the source of the famous quotation "Je pense, donc je suis" (English: "I think, therefore I am", or "I am thinking, therefore I exist"), which occurs in Part IV of the work. The similar Latin statement, Cogito, ergo sum, is found in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and Principles of Philosophy (1644).

Discourse on the Method is one of the most influential works in the history of modern philosophy, and important to the development of natural sciences. In this work, Descartes tackles the problem of skepticism, which had previously been studied by Sextus Empiricus, Al-Ghazali[3] and Michel de Montaigne. Descartes modified it to account for a truth he found to be incontrovertible. Descartes started his line of reasoning by doubting everything, so as to assess the world from a fresh perspective, clear of any preconceived notions.

The book was originally published in Leiden, in the Netherlands. Later, it was translated into Latin and published in 1656 in Amsterdam. The book was intended as an introduction to three works: Dioptrique, Météores and Géométrie. La Géométrie contains Descartes's initial concepts that later developed into the Cartesian coordinate system. The text was written and published in French rather than the language in which philosophical and scientific texts were most frequently written and published in at the time, namely, Latin. Most of Descartes' other works were written in Latin.