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Tallis in Wonderland

Cogito, Ergo Sum?

Raymond Tallis has a long-postponed meeting with M. Descartes.

René Descartes (1596-1650) has been a conspicuous absentee from this column. Well, here he is at last, uttering perhaps the most famous sentence in Western philosophy: Cogito, ergo sum, or ‘I think therefore I am’. This rather odd statement of the seemingly obvious was prompted by a search for something beyond the reach of doubt, as Descartes describes in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).

As to the grounds for pervasive doubt, Descartes tells us he’s had experiences in dreams very similar to those when he was awake. When he was dreaming, he believed that the dreams corresponded to reality.

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