A few clips of Paul Ricœur discussing Descartes. He explains why the birth of modern thought goes back to Descartes. For unlike the Greek world and Middle Ages, which took the notion of Being and Substance as their guide, it is subjectivity and the thinking subject which became the new value of thought with Descartes. He goes on to discuss Descartes' rationalism, as well as the famous Cogito, which is taken to be the first truth, the primary truth, but which comes at the price of alienation from the entire external world vis-à-vis his skeptical method of universal doubt and the resulting gulf between mind and world.

This comes a 1987 interview with the Multimedia Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. As always, the translation is my own.

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