Summary of Simon Blackburn's Think

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

#1 We all have the fear that the world we live in is a dream, and that the things we take for granted are actually fantasies. But how do we know that the world as we take it to be, is the world as it is.

#2 The problems of the self, mortality, knowledge, and the nature of the world are all raised in the oldest philosophical texts. The generation before Descartes included the French essayist Montaigne, whose motto was the title of one of his great essays: Que sais-je.

#3 There are six Meditations in the first part of the book. In the first, Descartes introduces the method of doubt. He resolves that if he is to establish anything in the sciences that is stable and likely to last, he must demolish all his ordinary opinions and start from the foundations.

#4 Descartes realized that his understanding of himself was not based on knowledge of his embodied existence. He realized that a conception of oneself as an embodied thing living in an extended spatial world of physical objects will inevitably come back. The I he is left with is pretty thin: this puzzling I that cannot be pictured in the imagination.

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