Читать книгу Philosophy For Dummies - Tom Morris - Страница 61

René Descartes, military man, mathematician, and philosophical whiz kid, was an ultimate intellectual rebel. As an experiment, he decided not to believe anything anyone had ever told him, and not even to trust his own senses. In an attempt to determine whether anything is utterly indubitable, or impossible to doubt, he proposed to try to doubt everything. One thing he concluded that he could not doubt or deny — the fact that in his very act of doubting, he was thinking. And from this, he saw it followed that he must actually exist. Thus he bequeathed to history the most famous piece of philosophical reasoning ever: “I think, therefore I am” (in French, “Je pense, donc je suis,” or in the more famous Latin formulation, “Cogito ergo sum.”). From this foundation, he then began to build up a body of knowledge he thought he could trust absolutely.