Three Essays on ProustIntroductionLast winter, in Candace Vogler's Philosophical Perspectives on the Humanities class, we were asked to write six short essays connecting Marcel's Swann's Way Proust to several texts of cognitive philosophy, including the Meditations of René Descartes. on Early Philosophy and the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous by George Berkeley. Our task was to communicate the ideas of Proust, Descartes and Berkeley – to juxtapose and compare their ideas about what constitutes experience, what constitutes divinity, what knowledge is, what being is . This is what these three essays attempt to address.Note on the texts: Proust's Swann's Way is the first volume of his eight-volume continuous story Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Times. (In the French original, it's A la recherche du temps perdu.) It is the story of one man's life, a first-person memoir, a fictional autobiography. Le Chemin de Swann is the story of this character's love for his mother and for the daughter Gilberte and his account of the love of his friend Swann for the woman Odette. In class, we called the unnamed character/narrator “Marcel” – “old Marcel” when he is the adult man telling his childhood story and “young Marcel” when he is the child. Marcel Proust is a separate entity – of course, the author of the novel. Swann's Way is written in four books, the Overture, Combray, Swann Lovers and Names of Places: The Name, all of which are mentioned in the essays. Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy question and define knowledge and existence. Descartes also uses a first-person voice, which we call “the Meditator.” It is the Meditator who goes through the method of progressive doubt and refounds all knowledge on the basis of the “cogito”: Thus, after everything has been most carefully weighed, it is finally necessary to establish that “I am, I exist” . is necessarily true whenever I propose it or conceive it in my mind. Berkeley's Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous is an argument between the Cartesian thinker Hylas and Berkeley's Philonous. In the first of these dialogues, Berkley argues that the Cartesian notion of substance is incoherent and that the word "matter" as Descartes uses it has no meaning. Essay 1 All these memories, superimposed on each other, now formed a single mass, but had not until now merged