As part of preparing for our discussion of Descartes’ Discourse on Wed., you should (as always) think of questions about the text that we might discuss. Your assignment is to send me one such question before 6 am on Wed. You should (also as always) direct people to a particular location in the text; that means a page number or comparably specific description of the location.

Anything in Descartes that you find worth discussing is fair game, but I can note a couple of my reasons for assigning the work (it’s an “instructor’s choice” text rather than a commonly read one). First, although some autobiographical works were written in the 1200 years separating Augustine and Descartes, there had been relatively few, so people are often led to compare the two. You might ask yourself what, so far as you can tell from the initial portions of them, Augustine and Descartes seem to be trying to accomplish in writing these works. Second, both Augustine and Descartes discuss their education and the value they found in it. Both have something to say about the place of literary works in education; and, since Descartes was educated near the end of the Renaissance, a time when an interest in ancient literature was revived in Europe, there is likely to have a large overlap in the literature they were familiar with.