Discours de la méthode

The French Leiden 1637 is the true first and precedes everything. The first Latin is separately collected: 'Renati Des Cartes Specimina philosophiae: seu Dissertatio de methodo…', Amsterdam: Louis Elzevir, 1644, translated by Étienne de Courcelles and revised by Descartes himself — notable as the first appearance of 'cogito ergo sum' in Latin (the French of 1637 reads 'je pense, donc je suis'). CENSUS NOTE CORRECTED: the claim that there was 'no English edition until much later' is wrong. The first English edition appeared within Descartes's own century — 'A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason, and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences', London: printed by Thomas Newcombe, 1649. The 1637 French, the 1644 Latin and the 1649 English are all separately collected, with the 1637 the unambiguous first.