With the 1641 publication of Rene Descartes' "Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae," in its inexorable movement toward the exclusion of dreams, modern philosophy reaches a moment in the ultimate paragraph of the sixth "Meditation" where at last it is able to sleep at night, unhindered by the disruptions of the dream, certain it has exceeded the bounds of the preceding philosophical epoch. Should we choose to take Descartes at his word, modernity has arrived on the scene of philosophy in the guise of an awakening of philosophy's reason from a long slumber of uncertain dreams. If any event in the...