The Search for Truth by Natural Light

The Search for Truth by Natural Light (La recherche de la vérité par la lumière naturelle) is an unfinished philosophical dialogue by René Descartes “set in the courtly culture of the ‘honnête homme’ and ‘curiosité’.” It was written in French (presumably after the Meditations was completed) but first published (Amsterdam, 1684) in Dutch translation in a collection of letters from Descartes by JH Glazemaker, and then in a Latin translation in the Opuscola posthuma, physica & mathematica (Amsterdam, 1701). The original French was lost around 1700 but a partial copy was discovered in G.W. Leibniz's papers in Hanover in 1908 and published in the Adam-Tannery edition of Descartes's works and correspondence (vol. X, pp. 495-532). A definitive edition, containing the partial French text plus the fuller Dutch and Latin translations on facing pages was published in 2002. The opening passage (translated by Norman Kemp Smith to English in 1957) "is a helpful commentary on the argument of Articles 74-78" of The Passions of the Soul.