This is an English translation of Descartes' seminal discourse, with an original essay by Richard Kennington. This text is designed to provide the student with a close translation, notes, and a glossary of key terms, facilitating access to ideas as they originally were presented and helping to make the translator's work transparent. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Decartes' immediate audience.

Richard Kennington (1921-1999) was a professor of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University and The Catholic University of America. His teaching was centered largely on seventeenth-century thinkers, primarily Bacon and Descartes, but included also Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, and Spinoza. He was a serious scholar of ancient and contemporary thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Heidegger, on whom he frequently lectured. A collection of his writings, On Modern Origins, traces the transition from a classical, largely speculative tradition in philosophy to the new meaning of nature and theory that characterizes modern philosophy and science.Pamela Kraus teaches at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.Frank Hunt teaches at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They are coeditors of Richard Kennington, On Modern Origins: Essays in Early Modern Philosophy (Lexington Press, 2004).