1. My discipline is philosophy. This is not a particularly popular subject to study today, and is becoming even less popular as people become less and less sure of the economy. Philosophy as an academic subject epitomizes everything that people believe to be frivolous about higher education. It is alright in theory but isn't practical. But it is this very lack of practicality that has attracted me to the discipline. I think that there will be time enough to be an ant for the rest of my life and to be concerned with getting and spending and laying up stores for the winter. I do not believe that the most important thing that I should be doing as a student is to be studying a discipline such as business and so effectively preparing for that time when I will not be a student. Moreover, I believe both that my life will be more rewarding and that I will be better able to meet all the challenges (from the economic to the moral) that life is bound to offer to me if I take the time now to study what some of the most intelligent men and women have thought and written about the important issues that face humanity.
2. I have chosen to write about Rene Descartes for two reasons. The first is that I believe that many people today do not understand his theories and I want to be able in my own mind at least to have a clear sense of the dimensions and significance of his work. The second reason that I chose Descartes is that I believe that he is one of the most important of all of the modern philosophers in terms of his lasting influence on Western thought. His concept of dualism was not, of course, entirely original to him: One of the reasons that he is so important as a philosopher is that he chose to crystallize thinking about an epistemological issue that was already fundamentally important to Western society. However, through his thinking and his writing on this topic, he succeeded in making dualism and dualistic thinking even more deeply entre...