Preface

In a famous letter addressed in March 1636 to his friend Marin Mersenne, René Descartes writes that the aim of his Discourse on the Method is trying “to demonstrate the existence of God and of the soul separated from the body…”. The progress of modernity has decreed that such an attempt must be regarded as entirely outdated — at least in terms of apodeixis, that is, of demonstrative proof — and that, although subsequent tradition has rightly placed its author and la methode he proposed among the great founding moments of modern subjectivity, Descartes’s original intention must be relegated to the antiquated remnants of thought.