Cogito, Ergo Sum

no

nyet

No, only that they can't confirm their existence to themselves. If you ask me the whole phrase is a load of crap. Descartes tried to find an absolute from witch he could build his ladder that ends halfway up the wall. It is a sorry thing, so full of presumtions that it is even more a riddle than the initial inspiration to invent it.

Among all the things Descartes doubts there is one that passes unexamined, and that is his own capacity for doubt, wich in turn renders the whole useless, a totem of his immens pride, nothing more.

All "existence" implies both "an observer" and "an observed. The concept "inanimate object" is directly related to our ideas of "animation" and "physical structure".

Whoa, hold on there Cyracuz. "I think therefore I am" is a very good argument for rejecting the doubt of existence.

Descartes was the first prominent modern philosopher because he suggested that we should doubt and examine everything.

By what rationality should we examine and doubt everything? It seems to me that Descartes endows the human reason with divine attributes, the power to glean absolute truth out of everything. I cannot say I have the same faith in us.

It is a fact that in order to doubt you need something solid to scale things against. You need to have an idea of what is true to decide that something might not be. That is why Descartes is so full of crap. He probably didn't even know it himself. In short: It is impossible to doubt everything.

Re: Cogito, Ergo Sum


I believe it is not about existence but self-awareness.

No, it's about one man's urge to leave his print on things. And about how we are so inclined to believe it.

You see, the only thing I really have against philosophers is that they tend to leave philosophies. Their accumulation of knowledge stems from a genuine desire for knowledge and wisdom. The desire to write it down and preach on the other hand, is another motivation entirely, and that is evident in the fact that the fellow did put his name on it.

We should be wary of philosophers, of their words and motives. After all, what is the difference between blindly accepting the christian genesis and Kant's categorical imperatives?

thats a good answer fresco, one that I am still struggling to absorb.

Then you have to digest it...

you supply the digestive

it makes the philosophy much easier.

No transcendental concept overcomes that simple idea!

alcohol is the bedrock of philosophy, if not civilisation itself.

IMHO

Steve,

You merely need to consider whether a duck (say) has a concept of "a lake" as an "inanimate object".
The fact that ducks seek out lakes merely implies they are looking for "sittingness plus feedingness"
For a duck, a puddle might be equivalent until the duck gets hungry. Thus the "existence" of "lake" implies functionality relative to a particular observer. No observer -No relativity - No existence.

we ate duck last night. does that count?

yeah...I know being flippant again.

I agree without the observer who is to say whether the observed exists. But does a duck count?

That is if it was you or I coming in to land (flapping a lot) on a pond...then clearly the pond as we know it exists.

But pond in the duck dictionary might not exist.

Story I got (from a lapsed Jesuit philosophy prof) was that Descartes was in trouble with some churchy types for his ruminations, and produced a tract "proving" the existence of God through his own brand of thought, and then they left him and his philosophy alone.

The bit about the ball of wax is entertaining enough, though.

Steve,

When you move on to "knowing" you are evoking an expected relationship...but its still a relationship. The word "lake" evokes a potential relationship without full perceptual engagement, but in order to understand this word (experience the evocation) without ever having had a perceptual experience we need to be in relationship with someone who has, via shared words/evocations.
LATER EDIT: We differ from ducks ( ) by our use of language. Since "words" become disembodied signifiers of full perceptual experiences then we have the impression of those experiences existing independently of ourselves as "objects". This is the fallacy of naive realism.

Patiodog.

This move by Descartes seems typical of philosophers who couldn't rock the boat. Newton was another, His disbelief in "the Trinity" was kept secret from the Cambridge authorities bcause it compromised his position at Trinity College.

Cogito ergo sum should be translated as: "There is thinking that there is thinking, ergo there is thinking that there is a thinker behind the thinking". An example of our need to perceive and discuss the world grammatically (subject-predicate structure). I've said this countless times on A2K.
If there is one thing I do not doubt it is that Descartes accepted the existence of his egoself BEFORE he proposed the exercise to doubt everything. He knew perfectly well where his argument was headed.
The use of his ego-supporting dictum (cogito ergo sum) only served to "prove" God's existence as a pro-forma bow to eclesiastical authorities. Smart man.