Eli5: What does ‘I think therefore I am’ mean and why is it a big deal?
In: Culture
The phrase “I think therefore I am”, or “Cogito ergo sum” in Latin, was made popular by the philosopher Rene Descartes.
In his work, he goes about destroying the assumptions that most people had in philosophy before him. Many people would say, “ah well I see the sun, or I feel the grass, so therefore it exists”. Descartes basically said, “ok, but what if your brain is in a jar, and you are just dreaming all of this?”
Philosophy is based on axioms. Axioms are self-evident facets of reason that allow you to construct the rest of philosophy on them. Descartes basically argued that all of the axioms that had previously been used were wrong because they were not self-evident. In the same sense that you don’t know you are in a dream when you are dreaming, how do you know that anything around you is as it truly is? So he started his philosophy with doubting **everything.**
At first, he couldn’t figure out where to go from there. How are you supposed to know anything if you doubt everything? Eventually, he discovers his first axiom: I think therefore I am. In order for him to doubt everything, **he** must exist. He can’t assume anything about who or what he really is but he can safely assume that he exists, otherwise, he would not be thinking about the fact that he exists.
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