In his landmark works Discourse on the Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), René Descartes tackled a simple yet imposing question: how can one know anything for certain? Laid out in methodical detail, his answers would provide the foundation for modern philosophy and science. In this video from 1987, the celebrated UK broadcaster and philosophy populariser Bryan Magee (1930-2019) dissects Descartes’s world-changing writings alongside the UK philosopher and Descartes scholar Bernard Williams (1929-2003). In doing so, the pair touches on how the existence of God was fundamental to Descartes’s construction of the Universe, what precisely he meant in proclaiming ‘I think, therefore I am’, and which of his ideas have fallen out of fashion in contemporary philosophy.
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
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Political philosophy
Beyond the veil – what rules would govern John Rawls’s ‘realistic Utopia’?
6 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes
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Architecture
The celebrated architect who took inspiration from sitting, waiting and contemplating
29 minutes
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Rituals and celebrations
A beginner’s guide to a joyful Persian tradition of spring renewal and rebirth
3 minutes
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Metaphysics
Simple entities in universal harmony – Leibniz’s evocative perspective on reality
4 minutes