Descartes's Rules For The Direction Of The Mind

During the early 1930's, Harold H. Joachim, as Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, delivered the Logical Studies as a course of lectures extending over two terms of the aca-demic year, and in the third term he delivered a set of lec-tures on the Regulae of Descartes. The Logical Studies, have long since been published, but the manuscript of the Descartes lectures was lost, and there is reason to believe that it was accidentally destroyed with certain domestic pa-pers of no philosophical importance. With the extinction of all hope of finding the original manuscript it seems fitting that, rather than submit to the complete loss of this work to the world of scholarship, an attempt should be made to re-construct it from the notes taken by some of those who heard the lectures. Two sets of notes (all, so far as I can ascertain, that are available) have been used for this pur-pose: those of Mr. John Austin, now White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, and my own. Let me at once record my gratitude to Professor Austin for the use he has allowed me of his excellent set of notes. It was my own en-deavour as a student to get down, so far as was physically possible, every word of Joachim's lectures, but Professor Austin, by adopting a more telegraphic style, succeeded in recording even more of the substance and detail of the lec-tures than I had.