Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Descartes' Cogito
- 1 The Prolegomena to Any Future Epistemology
- 2 The Problem of Epistemology
- 3 The Solution: Cogito
- 4 A Skeptic against Reason
- 5 The Five Ways
- 6 Cogito: Not an Argument
- 7 The Content of the Cogito
- 8 Memory, Explanation, and Will
- Appendix A Comments on Jeffrey Tlumak's “Certainty and Cartesian Method”
- Appendix B Comments on Robert Nozick's “Fiction”
- Appendix C Cogito and the Port-Royal Logic
- Appendix D Bacon and Descartes
- Appendix E Comments on Anthony Kenny's “Descartes on the Will”
- Bibliography
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Descartes' Cogito
- 1 The Prolegomena to Any Future Epistemology
- 2 The Problem of Epistemology
- 3 The Solution: Cogito
- 4 A Skeptic against Reason
- 5 The Five Ways
- 6 Cogito: Not an Argument
- 7 The Content of the Cogito
- 8 Memory, Explanation, and Will
- Appendix A Comments on Jeffrey Tlumak's “Certainty and Cartesian Method”
- Appendix B Comments on Robert Nozick's “Fiction”
- Appendix C Cogito and the Port-Royal Logic
- Appendix D Bacon and Descartes
- Appendix E Comments on Anthony Kenny's “Descartes on the Will”
- Bibliography
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
Rene Descartes offered an ultimate truth, famously known as the cogito. But there have been virtually no takers. Some have thought that it was merely an analytic statement, a statement empty of content; some have thought that he should have begun with a less complex, a less unwarranted statement (but then he could not have derived the cogito from it); some have averred that it was an argument that was badly in need of repair (and when repaired, one that could not possibly do what Descartes had wanted it to do); and a distinguished philosopher once argued that the truth of the cogito, if that is what it is, is at best odd, “degenerate.” This has been the litany for 350 years.
Here is Descartes in Discourse on the Method:
But immediately I noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that this truth, “I am thinking, therefore I exist” was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.
Then, in his “Replies to the Second Set of Objections”:
When we observe that we are thinking beings, this is a sort of primary notion, which is not the conclusion of any syllogism; and, moreover, when somebody says: I am thinking, therefore I am or exist, he is not using a syllogism to deduce his existence from his thought, but recognizing this as something self-evident, in a simple mental intuition.
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- Descartes' CogitoSaved from the Great Shipwreck, pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003