³⁶ Some recent commentators speak of the Meditator as ‘she’, in order to emphasize the distinction between the ‘I’ of the text and the historical Descartes (Hatfield, Descartes and the ‘Meditations’, 51; and cf. C. Wilson, Descartes’s ‘Meditations’, 7). I do not follow this reasonable practice only because the original Latin puts the Meditator in the masculine gender.