René Descartes's Regulae ad directionem ingenii ('Rules for the Direction of the Understanding') is his earliest surviving philosophical treatise, and in many respects his most puzzling text. It is a profoundly original work with few intellectual precursors, and offers the fullest account anywhere in Descartes's work of his theory of method. Yet Descartes left it unfinished, and unpublished, at his death in 1650. The versions currently known to modern readers are all posthumous: a manuscript copied for Leibniz in the late seventeenth century, a Dutch translation of 1684, and the version printed in 1701 in Amsterdam. As a result, the details and date of its composition, its fragmentary, unfinished state, and its philosophical content have long puzzled scholars.
The discovery by Richard Serjeantson in 2011 of a previously unknown, early manuscript draft of the Regulae in Cambridge University Library was a hugely significant event in Cartesian scholarship. This edition presents the Cambridge manuscript of the Regulae alongside the 1701 Amsterdam version of the text to allow comparison between the early manuscript draft and the version best-known to modern readers, together with a full English translations of both texts. It is also the first critical edition of the Regulae to take into account the full range of textual witnesses to the text, both manuscript and printed. The new Cambridge manuscript sheds important light on the composition, date, and philosophical content of the Regulae, and will provoke scholars to rethink key questions about Descartes's early philosophical development.
Introduction
Editorial Introduction
The Texts
Cambridge manuscript
Amsterdam imprint
The Translations
Translation of the Cambridge manuscript
Translation of the Amsterdam imprint
Editor's Notes
Manuscript Descriptions
Appendix: List of manuscripts
Richard Serjeantson is Fellow and Lecturer in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied at York, Cambridge, and Princeton Universities. He has been a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology and held the Crausaz Wordsworth Fellowship in Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge. He has published on a range of philosophical authors from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, including Francis Bacon, John Locke, and David Hume. His research has increasingly focused on the identification, edition, and study of early modern philosophical manuscripts.
Michael Edwards is Gurnee Hart Fellow in History at Jesus College, Cambridge. He studied at Cambridge and Harvard University, where he was a Kennedy Scholar. From 2005 to 2009 he was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge. He has published on the early modern Aristotelian and scholastic traditions and their relationship to the philosophy of Hobbes and Descartes; on early modern psychology and natural philosophy; on the contexts in which knowledge circulated; and on the history of the book and libraries. He is the author of Time and the Science of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy (Brill, 2013).
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