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The ''Discourse on the Method'' ((フランス語:Discours de la méthode)) is a philosophical and autobiographical treatise published by René Descartes in 1637. Its full name is ''Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences'' (French title: ''Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences''). The ''Discourse on The Method'' is best known as the source of the famous quotation "''Je pense, donc je suis''" ("I think, therefore I am", "I'm thinking, so I exist", which occurs in Part IV of the work. (The similar statement in Latin, ''Cogito ergo sum'', is found in Part I, §7 of ''Principles of Philosophy''.) The ''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 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' first introduction of the Cartesian coordinate system. That the text was written and published in French rather than Latin, which was the language in which philosophical and scientific texts were most frequently written and published (as were most of Descartes' other works), is worth noting. Together with ''Meditations on First Philosophy'' (''Meditationes de Prima Philosophia''), ''Principles of Philosophy'' (''Principia philosophiae'') and ''Rules for the Direction of the Mind'' (''Regulae ad directionem ingenii''), it forms the base of the epistemology known as Cartesianism. ==Organization== The book is divided into six parts, described in the author's preface as # Various considerations touching the Sciences # The principal rules of the Method which the Author has discovered # Certain of the rules of Morals which he has deduced from this Method # The reasonings by which he establishes the existence of God and of the Human Soul # The order of the Physical questions which he has investigated, and, in particular, the explication of the motion of the heart and of some other difficulties pertaining to Medicine, as also the difference between the soul of man and that of the brutes # What the Author believes to be required in order to greater advancement in the investigation of Nature than has yet been made, with the reasons that have induced him to write 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Discourse on the Method」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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