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The chapter presents a study of one of Descartes' most important works: the Discourse on Method. In many respects, the Discourse contains the outline of modern philosophy. Philosophically speaking, the Discourse even appears to determine the position of modern philosophy with respect to science. Discourse seeks to persuade people in possession of the natural light of reason of the following: there can be a science that is true and certain; this science must be acquired by using a heuristic method which proceeds like the method of analysis in mathematics: one learns the necessary insights through step by step exercise; the method does not stand on its own: through exercise the mind itself develops toward a perfect capacity even for metaphysical knowledge; in the process of development self-consiousness in moral issues will be reached on the basis of true metaphysics; and the Discourse must persuade everybody, because if anything is wrong, the whole architecture collapses.

This chapter discusses Rene Descartes as an epistemologist. Descartes has become the villain in the drama of Western epistemology. His epistemological propping of his science became deeply important in the development of epistemology as a central activity of philosophy. He writes of himself as a benefactor of mankind. The Discourse on Method entails a contingent and human way of knowing. Descartes' morality of knowledge comes to depend on a characteristic Enlightenment assumption that the will acts according to what the understanding reveals. Descartes demonstrates the myth that knowledge is attainable only through shucking the senses, verging on what would seem, to the flawed perceptions of common sense, rather like death. In keeping with a Christian sense of the fallen nature of humanity, Descartes worked into his final comments in the Sixth Meditation a recognition of how extraordinarily difficult is the detachment required to know.

This chapter discusses Descartes' answers to two questions still being asked today: Can machines fully imitate the functioning and behavior of living things? Can machines think? Descartes answers the first affirmatively and the second negatively. Descartes' two categorical answers are each rooted in the principle of the substantial distinction between body and soul—that is to say, in a metaphysical argument. In the Discourse on Method he asserts that there are two very certain means of distinguishing true men from anthropoid machines intentionally designed to throw us off the track: the first is that they could never use words, or put together other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. The second is that these machines would inevitably fail in other [things], which would reveal that they were acting not through understanding but only through the composition of their organs. Given this fact, the nature of the machinery a man of his time might have in mind is irrelevant in the chapter's discussion, and the modest development of 17th-century mechanization ought not to invalidate the perhaps exaggerated boldness of the positive answer to the first question, any more than it explains or, a fortiori, justifies the negative answer to the second.

This chapter examines the relation between fable and truth in Descartes’s Discourse as well as in his shorter treatise The World. Once we distinguish the fable from what is merely imaginary or false, it becomes possible to understand how Descartes does not merely propose a fable about truth but introduces feint or fiction within truth itself. Descartes’s fable does not instruct us about a Truth but presents a faithful description of Descartes’s life. It is the fable of frankness. At the same time, this fable does not propose a model to imitate since the uttering of the cogito cannot be imitated. Rather, the fable exposes the cogito as the point where fiction turns into truth.

The chapter examines the mode of presentation of Descartes’s method in the Discourse. What Descartes exposes in the Discourse is not so much a universal procedure to reach objective truth as himself, insofar as he is the author of his own method. The Discourse is a portrait or a mask, but it would be wrong to think that it serves merely to hide or cover an already existing truth. The hidden ground is only the reverse side that the painted surface makes visible. This mode of presentation of the subject in its truth means that self-appropriation is impossible since it necessitates a detour through a fictive viewer or reader.

The conclusion draws together the book’s major findings through a reading of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, focusing primarily upon the relationship between place and thought in the theorization of the cogito. Against Descartes’s fantasy of disembodied and placeless mind, the conclusion suggests that early modern English drama stages the impossibility of separating thought from its foundation in embodiment and environment, as well as the consequences—alternately tragic and comic—of attempting to do so. Not only do the plays considered in this book show thinking to be an ecological phenomenon; they also reveal that the act of thinking through place can transform the contours of a location.

This chapter presents a conversation that took place by e-mail with Jean-Michel Rabaté on the question of deconstruction and place, initially written to be performed by him and the author at a conference in Paris in 2003. Rabaté is both one of the most eminent and energetic commentators on Jacques Derrida's work, and someone who knew him well over a much longer period than the author did. Derrida seems to provide his own parody of Descartes' Discourse on Method. Literature has always already thought the deconstructive undoing or opening what Derrida started because it contains a hidden, latent, unknown knowledge about itself: the inadequacy of a purely ‘objective’ sociological analysis of the place, and places, of deconstruction; not that they are invalid, but that they leave many questions still in place.