Descartes

“I Think Therefore I Am” (Descartes)

Cogito ergo sum AKA “I think therefore I am” was a statement created by the philosopher/mathematician Rene Descartes that was the conclusion of the search he steered for a statement that could not be doubted. Every day we come across the same things and don’t think twice about them. We hear people talk, react to the temperature outside, etc., but how can we prove that these things around us are truly occurring?

One may argue that we do not exist because we can doubt everything. However, you cannot doubt the fact that you can doubt anything and for that reason alone, we exist in this world. Living in a period where people were skeptical of all knowledge and were basically forced to believe everything that ought to be in the bible, he had to break from everything that was known to him and with a new foundation, start over and try to find out what universal knowledge and matter truly is.

Descartes distinctly knows that he is a thinking thing, but his idea of body is clearly different. In fact, his idea of body is completely incompatible with thinking; in Descartes’ mind, the idea of a “thinking body” is a contradictory. He also does not believe in senses. Perhaps there is no such thing as sense; maybe we do just learn them from the time we are born. For instance, there’s no such thing as “cold.” He also noted that the physical world does not exist, which might also seem to advocate his nonexistence. Yet, to doubt these things, he must exist. He found that he could not doubt that he existed, as he was the individual doing the doubting. To be misled in these treacherous ways, he must exist in order to be swayed. Further he states that he exists just as long as he is thinking.

In Descartes research, he questions everything from trees, to the existence of God, to himself. The method of this hyperbolic doubt is the refusal to accept either the power of previous experiences (a posteriori) or information collected from one's own...