Maybe I’m just small brained but I’ve never understood this phrase
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Descartes apparently regretted this, mostly the ‘therefore’ part, because that’s not his point. He then replaced by I am, I exist (ego sum, ego existo).
The point is that since something is thinking, there must be a something.
You know how you learn by building on past experiences as a foundation? Example, you’ve touched a hot stove and it hurt, you’ve touched a hot car seat and it also hurt, so you know that if something you’ve never touched is very hot, that it will hurt to touch it. This is called a conclusion.
You can apply this process of drawing conclusions based not on experiences, but assumptions. I’ve never kicked a donkey, but I assume they would react violently. If I assume this to be true, then I conclude I should not kick a donkey if I don’t want to be around an angry donkey.
This assumption may be wrong: maybe there’s a special way to kick a donkey that WON’T cause it to react violently. In fact, you can, by kicking it softer in a fleshy part of its body. So really my assumption is not entirely right: someone can argue with me and prove me wrong on my assumption. My assumption is weak.
“I think, therefore I am,” is considered a foundational assumption of the study of the mind, the individual, and social interactions, aka Philosophy. Unlike my assumption that donkeys always hate to be kicked, there is no other philosophical assumption you can make as strongly, and nobody can argue against it.
You can use logic to build off of strong assumptions, and “I think, therefore, I am” is considered as strong an assumption as anyone can make.
It does not really make sense unless provided some context as to what Descartes was trying to say. Descartes was trying to wrap his head around how he would be able to know if anything was inherently true. If I recall correctly, the phrase «corgito ergo sum» or I think, therefore I am» he found to be the only true statement he could make. Every other statement was subject to corruption of the mind and senses, if, for example he saw a black horse, he could not 100% state the horse was black, because he could be dreaming – Someone with more knowledge feel free to correct me!!
The context, is that before descartes, for thousands of years, there was philosophy. And philosophers worked on all sorts of questions they figured to be important, like Who are we? Why are? Are we really? What is it all for? Etc.
These methods of inquiry didn’t really produce much results. The importance of this one quote of descartes is basically the idea to simply skip over such big existential unanswerable questions and instead to focus on questions that can be solved. More approachable problems that you can observe and make hypthesises about and test. That’s the basis of what scientific method was built from.
And it’s also about questioning your beliefs. To find out anything new, you must question if what you already know is correct or not. But that scepticism has to be bounded, if you observe something, you can’t simply discard your observation by being infinitely sceptical. You can’t go oh maybe my perception of entire reality is off so the results I got are still not valid. Like it or not, your results are what they are, and you have to live with it.
Skepticism was popular among Greek philosophers like Plato and Socrates and it can feel a bit absurd but essentially it’s about questioning literally everything or at least knowing that you don’t know. Cogito ergo sum is considered the bottom of the philosophical pyramid. I can’t prove anything, but I can think, therefore I must exist in some form.
It’s the idea that everything around us might be a lie, but we know for certain that we ourselves are not a lie. Solipsism is an interesting idea.
I think, therefore I am. He’s trying to answer the question: what does it mean to be? What is existence?
He decides that the fact that he’s thinking is enough proof that he exists. It doesn’t matter if it’s physical, spiritual, a simulation… he thinks, so he exists.
DeCartes was a philosopher, and he decided to apply the scientific method to philosophy, doubting every assumption we have about the world, and only accepting things as truth when there can be no alternative.
He doubted the existence of God, he doubted that any of his senses accurately represent the world around him, but there is one thing he could not come up with an alternative solution for. He was doubting those things, he was thinking about them. How could he think about those things if he didn’t exist? So his first concrete conclusion was “I can think, therefore I must exist”
This doesn’t disprove that he isn’t just a hallucinating brain in a jar somewhere, but it does prove that there is a thing that exists and it is doing thinking. The rest of DeCartes’ work builds up from here, and he knows he isn’t working off of any false assumptions.
There’s a famous question in philosophy of what knowledge you can be sure of, and what knowledge you can legitimately doubt. So for example, I can’t be sure I have hands even though I can see them, because I could be an amputee having a vivid dream.
Descartes contributed to that discussion by saying (in Latin) “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum.” The second half of that sentence is often translated as “I think, therefore I am.” What Descartes meant is that in the process of doubting his knowledge, he had to think, and people who don’t exist don’t think, so he couldn’t legitimately doubt his knowledge that he existed. A better translation might be something like “I doubt, so I think, and therefore I exist.”
It may be mistranslation.
Actual translation as suggested
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/i-think-therefore-i-am-descartes-cogito-ergo-sum-explained/
is,
“I am thinking, therefore I exist.”
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