Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Meditations on First Philosophy
Cogito ergo sum — radical doubt as method, the thinking thing as foundation, the world re-erected on the certainty of consciousness
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Meditations on First Philosophy |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Both |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Non-Deterministic |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Total |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Disembodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Personal |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Reason |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Meditations on First Philosophy
Time is treated as a real continuum in which the thinking thing endures from moment to moment. The third meditation's argument for God's existence rests on the requirement for continuous re-creation: my existence at each instant is not guaranteed by my existence at the previous instant, so something must be continuously sustaining me — God. Time is substantival, linear, and continuous.
Space
Meditations on First Philosophy
The sixth meditation's essence of body is *extension* — res extensa. Space is treated substantivally: bodies are extended things, fully geometric, infinitely divisible. Descartes denies vacuum (space and matter coincide for him), and identifies physical reality with mathematical extension so closely that the cosmos becomes a Euclidean geometric manifold.
Matter
Meditations on First Philosophy
Pure extension, indefinitely extended, mechanistically interacting through contact and motion. The wax example of the second meditation — a piece of wax loses every sensible property when heated yet remains the "same" extended thing — is the canonical argument for matter as essentially extension. Matter is conserved (Descartes anticipates the conservation of quantity of motion).
Observer
Meditations on First Philosophy
The cogito is the Cartesian observer: a thinking thing whose essence is consciousness, disembodied in essence (though embodied in practice through the pineal-gland union), singular at the foundational level (the cogito is "I", not "we"), active in willing and judging. Knowledge is total in principle when the will is properly disciplined under clear-and-distinct ideas. The metaphysical agency is personal — God is genuinely a benevolent guarantor of the cogito's clear ideas.
Energy
Meditations on First Philosophy
Energy is not Descartes's category, but his physics is committed to the conservation of total quantity of motion (Principles II.36) — an early energetic conservation principle. Within his mechanics, all change is the transfer of motion by contact, irreversibly dissipated in real physical collisions.
Information
Meditations on First Philosophy
Clear and distinct ideas are the substantival informational structure of the mind, conserved across reflection and underwritten by God. The soul is immortal (a thesis Descartes considers essential to Christianity and works to establish via the real distinction), so personal information is conserved across death.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
The Meditations' famous problems are textbook: the Cartesian circle (how can the cogito both depend on God's veracity and be the basis for proving it?); the interaction problem (how can the unextended mind move the extended body?); the precarious status of the third meditation's ontological-style arguments. Descartes' contemporaries — Mersenne, Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld — raised each of these in the appended Objections. The replies are ingenious; whether they are decisive is one of the longer-running disputes in philosophy.