Translator's preface

As early as 1640 Descartes had begun to work on a presentation of his philosophical system ‘in an order which will make it easy to teach’ (letter to Mersenne of 31 December). What he planned was a comprehensive university textbook which would rival and, he hoped, eventually replace the traditional texts based on Aristotle. He particularly wanted to include, though in a more circumspect form, material from his suppressed treatise, The World. ‘My World’, he wrote to Constantijn Huygens on 31 January 1642, ‘would be out already were it not that first of all I want to teach it to speak Latin. I shall call it the Summa Philosophiae, to help it gain a better reception among the Schoolmen, who are now persecuting it and trying to smother it at birth.’

The title which Descartes eventually adopted was Principia Philosophiae, and the Latin text was first published by Elzevir of Amsterdam in 1644. The work runs to four parts, each divided into a large number of short sections or ‘articles’ (there are five hundred and four in all). Part One expounds Descartes' metaphysical doctrines (though they are presented in a very different fashion from that of the Meditations); Part Two gives a full account of the principles of Cartesian physics; Part Three gives a detailed explanation, in accordance with those principles, of the nature of the universe; and Part Four deals similarly with the origins of the earth and a wide variety of terrestrial phenomena.