Descartes Reboots Everything

What happens when a brilliant thinker decides to tear down everything he believes in order to rebuild knowledge from scratch? In this lecture, Lee Braver guides you through Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, one of the most consequential texts in Western intellectual history. Beginning with the famous night in 1619 when Descartes resolved to transform how we acquire knowledge, Braver explains why Descartes was so dissatisfied with the education of his era: it produced no practical benefits, no medicine, no technology to improve human life. The lecture then unpacks Descartes' revolutionary strategy of methodological doubt, systematically attacking every category of belief, from empirical observations to mathematical truths, searching for anything that survives the most extreme skeptical scenarios imaginable. Braver illuminates how this process leads Descartes to his famous indubitable foundation, the certainty of his own existence as a thinking thing, and explores the deeper question of what it means to know not just that you exist, but what you are.