René Descartes (1596 – 1650) was an early modern philosopher who had a profound and constant influence on later thinking.
In his attempt to propose a knockout denial of skepticism, he came to the position of “I think, therefore I exist” (Cogito, ergo sum).
Even with the strongest and most far-reaching hypothesis, we can imagine (that there is an evil spirit committed to deceiving me at every moment of my life), I can be absolutely convinced of at least one truth. – that I am (sum).
Because in order to be deceived, I have to be. Therefore, the very possibility of doubt (doubt is a form of thinking) confirms the need for my own existence.
So, if I think at all, even though my thinking is questionable and wrong in all other respects, I must be somehow. If there is no one to be deceived, there would be no delusion, if there is delusion, there must be someone.
Voila! I am!
Something more important than even this argument against skepticism is the starting point bequeathed by Descartes to later thinking: the individual consciousness as an arbiter of truth and a source of meaning.
Related: Decentering of the subject
Charles S. Peirce believes that “Descartes marked the period when philosophy took off his children’s clothes and became a young man. By the time the young man became an adult, he would have learned that tradition is a precious treasure and iconoclastic militias are always cheap and often obscene“(CP 4.71).
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