Preface

Summary

The planning and execution of this volume has been very much a joint venture. The hard decisions about which texts to include, and how much of them, were made at a series of virtual and actual meetings, and the work of translation was divided up between the three of us (the initials of the relevant translator appear in square brackets at the end of the introduction to each text). All the work was then checked by at least one other member of the team before the final version was prepared. In the case of the extracts from Dupleix and de Silhon, Roger Ariew was joined as translator by Marjorie Grene, and her invaluable work on this material is gratefully acknowledged here. We have tried in the introductions to each text to provide the reader with essential historical information about the authors and the provenance of the materials, and also to give a brief indication of some of the main points of philosophical importance, and the principal ways in which the materials shed light on the intellectual context of Descartes' philosophy. The explanatory footnotes appended to the texts have all been added by the present editors, unless otherwise stated. Constraints of space, as well as considerations of philosophical relevance, have made it necessary to abridge much of the material, and deletions are indicated throughout by ellipses.