New Online Class Enrolling: Rene Descartes' Meditations, Objections, and Replies
an opportunity to study a key text of early modern philosophy
A comment I often hear and read is “I wish I could take a philosophy class with you!” The classes I teach at academic institutions are restricted to students enrolled at those colleges or universities. But there is also the Study With Sadler academy, where I design, build, offer, and teach classes for learners worldwide.
I have a new class currently enrolling, and starting on Saturday, June 15. It’s called, straightforwardly enough Rene Descartes’ Meditations, Objections, and Replies. And that’s precisely what we will work through during the course.
I’m very happy to offer this class to the interested public, and I’ll tell you a bit more about why that’s the case below. First, though, there’s some bare-bones information about the class itself to impart.
Basic Information About The Class
Rene Descartes’ Meditations, Objections, and Replies is an online synchronous class, meeting for 8 weeks. Online is pretty self-explanatory. Everything we do in the class happens online, using the course site or Zoom. All the resources for the class are stored and uploaded into that course website.
Synchronous means that this is a class that has regular class session meeting times, and we progress through it together as a group. This class lasts 8 weeks, and meets each Saturday at 10 AM Central Time using Zoom. Each class session is 90 minutes long (though sometimes, I’ll go a bit longer, if there are a lot of student questions).
We follow up the class sessions with discussion forums in the class site. The class sessions are recorded and the videos of them are also stored in the class site, so if you miss a class, or you just want to review a session, you can easily go in and watch or listen to it. As a student, once you’ve enrolled, you get lifetime access to the class site and its contents, even after class sessions have ended.
We start meeting with the first class session on Saturday June 15, and the class continues to the final class session on Saturday, August 3 (though I have been known to add a “bonus” session to some of my online classes).
There is a tuition fee for this class, which is US$249.00. I try to keep costs low for students, and I get told by a lot of students I provide a lot compared to what I charge for high-quality education in philosophy. What people pay for in a class like this is my expertise both in the subject-matter and as a seasoned educator. Charging tuition is what allows me to offer these learning opportunities to people outside of academia.
The schedule for the class runs like this:
Week 1 – Introduction to the Class, First Meditation: What can be called into doubt
Week 2 – Second Meditation : The nature of the human mind and how it is better known from the body
Week 3 – Third meditation: The existence of God
Week 4 – Fourth Meditation: Of the true and the false
Week 5 –Fifth Meditation: The existence of material things, & the existence of God considered again
Week 6 – Sixth Meditation : The existence of material things & real distinction between mind and body
Week 7 – Objections 1-4 from Caterus, selected authors compiled by Marin Mersenne, Thomas Hobbes, and Antoine Arnauld, and Descartes' Replies 1-4
Week 8 – Objections 5-7 from Pierre Gassendi, additional authors compiled by Marin Mersenne, and Pierre Bourdin and Descartes' Replies 5-7
You can find out more about the class, enroll in it if you’d like, and even see a few bits of it by going to the class page.
Why I’m Looking Forward To This Class
So, a little personal history to start. Descartes’ Meditations was one of the first philosophical texts that I tried my hand at understanding early on in college, on my own without any guidance from my philosophy professors (who frankly, were pretty disengaged outside of the classes they taught). I didn’t make much progress, and perhaps understood a tenth of what I was reading of the text back then!
By the time that I graduated, I had a better (but not great) understanding of Descartes’ Meditations. It was only in graduate school that I came to fully understand as well as to appreciate that text, and Descartes’ thought more generally, and that happened for four main reasons.
The first just had to do with capacities. I’d greatly improved my French and learned Latin (which many of Descartes works were originally written in), and that opened up for me possibilities for grasping what was actually being said by Descartes that could sometimes be obscured by English translators.
The second was that I actually took a semester-long seminar specifically on Descartes’ thought and works, in which the Meditations - and the objections and Descartes’ own replies - featured centrally.
A third factor was that the Meditations were one of the texts included in the extensive reading lists for both our Masters-level comprehensive examinations and our Doctoral-level preliminary examinations. So I spent a good bit of time studying that work in order to be able to thoughtfully answer essay questions on it.
Fourth - and this is something that has carried through my career post-graduation - I had to teach this text to undergraduate, non-philosophy-major students. You get to know a text in ways somewhat different and complementary when you have to lead others through it.
I never became a Cartesian, and there are in fact many points on which I disagree with Descartes, but as I developed a fuller understanding of his thought, a greater appreciation for it developed alongside (something that has been the case. I enjoy and look forward to teaching, or producing content about, Descartes’ work. And I think that he’s an important thinker to encounter and grapple with in the course of studying philosophy.
I’m very much looking forward to leading a new cohort of learners through the Meditations, the objections, and the replies. For 8 weeks, we’ll get to focus in a careful, concerted way on what Descartes is actually proposing and arguing in the work. It also offers me an opportunity and motivation for developing more resources on portions of that text. And I always enjoy getting to see what others make of classic philosophical works, and seeing their own progress in developing a solid understanding of them.
So if the prospect of taking this journey with me into one major work by this absolutely central thinker interests you, go ahead and check out the class Rene Descartes’ Meditations, Objections, and Replies. See if it is for you, and consider enrolling as a student.