Cogito Ergo Sum

In Our Time: Philosophy

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2011

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss one of the most famous statements in philosophy: "Cogito ergo sum".In his Discourse on the Method, published in 1637, the French polymath Rene Descartes wrote a sentence which remains familiar today even to many people who have never heard of him. "I think", he wrote, "therefore I exist". Although the statement was made in French, it has become better known in its Latin translation; and philosophers ever since have referred to it as the Cogito Argument.In his first Meditation, published ten years after the Discourse, Descartes went even further. He asserted the need to demolish everything completely and start right again from the foundations, arguing, for instance, that information from the senses cannot be trusted. The only thing he could be sure of was this: because he was thinking, he must exist. This simple idea continues to stir up enormous interest and has attracted comment from thinkers from Hobbes to Nietzsche and Sartre. With:Susan JamesProfessor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of LondonJohn CottinghamProfessor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading and Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of LondonStephen MulhallProfessor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:09.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello, there are a few sentences in the history philosophy that have become as famous
0:16.6	as their authors.
0:18.1	The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates in the 5th century BC.
0:23.0	Man is born free, wrote Russo, two millennia later, but everywhere he is in change.
0:28.0	Pythia still is Nietzsche's statement, God is dead.
0:31.0	But perhaps the best known saying in the history of philosophy is one usually quoted in Latin.
0:35.8	Kogito Ergo Sum, I think, therefore I am. This statement first appeared in 1637 in a work by the French philosopher René Descartes.
0:45.6	Despite its simplicity, it's the starting point for an entire system of thought.
0:49.6	Today, Descartes' cogito argument is commonly regarded as one of the foundations of modern philosophy.
0:56.4	But what does this apparently unassuming sentence mean and why does it still provoke criticism
1:01.3	and comment almost 400 years after it was written.
1:04.3	With me to discuss Descartes in his statement, Cogito Ergo Sommer, Susan James, Professor
1:09.4	of Philosophy, Birkbeck College University of London, John Coddingham, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the
1:15.0	University of Reading and Professor Real Research Fellow at Haythrop College University of London,
1:20.2	and Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford.
1:23.8	Susan James, we've called this programme Cogito Ergo Summer, that's not how it started.
1:28.7	Could you tell us what he, Decad, actually did right and do you think it means?
1:34.0	Well, Descartes first used this phrase in passing in the work that he published in 1637 called
1:41.6	the Discourse on Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Seeking
1:46.1	the Truth in the Sciences.
	...

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