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For Augustine, one’s freedom and responsibility is elucidated by means of a process of calling the notion of will into question (‘I don’t know’). This process gives rise to an understanding of will, freedom, and responsibility as the condition for the possibility of knowledge. It is this process that is most cogito-like. However, it is significantly cogito-unlike in that the argument depends on the very possibility of denying that one has will. Augustine’s account of freedom and responsibility is grounded in a deep notion of subjectivity, and the epistemological significance of the first-person perspective.

When Descartes published his Meditations, the similarity of his arguments to some found in Augustine was immediately pointed out to him. The most frequently cited and most similar is Augustine’s claim that ‘If I doubt, I am’ (City of God 11.26). This chapter discusses this text in detail, and suggests that the relationship with Descartes is illuminating. It identifies three cogito-like arguments in On Free Choice, all of which act as starting points, involve revealing the self-evidence of certain undeniable truths, include an analysis of what is to know something, and incorporate an idea of value.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Descartes' proposition, Cogito or in English, I think, and his “thinking-man paradox”. It explains the focus of the book, which is the predicate (verb) of the proposition I think. The book seeks to determine what thinking is and what it is for a human being to be thinking. This chapter also describes the instruction of students about Descartes' thinking-man project.

This chapter contrasts two methodologies for thinking about the nature of self, neither of which are fully satisfactory. The method of philosophical naturalism, which affirms a continuity between philosophy and natural science, leads to a conception of self as at best a reducible entity, reducible either simply to the body (Materialism) or else to an interconnected flow of mental particulars (the Humean view). Diametrically opposed to philosophical naturalism is an approach to the study of the self that rests on the use of imagination and intuition. Exercises of imagination lead to the discovery of a different kind of self, a self which consists essentially in thinking. The heart of the method is that if something can be imagined as separated from something else without being destroyed, then that other thing cannot be a part of its essence. This chapter then describes formulations of the cogito in the Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina and the Jaina Prabhācandra (both born in the year 980 ce). We learn from the Indian materialist Payāsi that any temptation to provide an explanation of the behaviour of the self by analogy with the behaviour of some physical entity or phenomenon is a trap, for such an attempt invariably ends up making the self sound like a mysterious crypto‐physical being, a recherché denizen in the physical world.

This chapter compares Frege's conception of apriority with those of Kant and Leibniz. The oddity (indeed, mistake) in Frege's explaining apriority in terms of derivation from general laws is explained and set in context. Frege's account is shown not to be equivalent with Kant's account of apriority in terms of independence of a justification from sense experience. Frege's attempt to show that his account is compatible with Kant's is criticized. Quite apart from its not explicitly mentioning sense experience, Frege's conception of apriority is not compatible with Kant's view that a singular capacity, pure intuition, underlies many a priori truths or cognitions; in fact, all synthetic a priori truths or cognitions. Frege takes the generality of a justification's (proof's) starting point as the essential kernel of apriority. Although Frege's conception is close to Leibniz's, it dispenses with Leibniz's heavy reliance on modality. Three areas of difficulty for Frege's conception of apriority are discussed: cogito judgments, judgments in geometry, and judgments in arithmetic. In each case, the idea that there is a priori truth or cognition whose justification has an ineliminably singular element is discussed. The problems raised by cogito judgments and judgments in arithmetic are taken to be serious threats to Frege's view that apriority is to be explained in terms of derivation from general propositions. The chapter article concludes by recommending the Kantian idea of fundamentally singular a priori cognition, without resting the idea on the Kantian notion of pure sensible intuition.

This chapter draws on the positive account of apperception that emerges from the transcendental deduction to illuminate the details of Kant’s criticisms of Rational Psychology. It argues that his fundamental objection to the Rational Psychologists is that they failed to recognize that the representation ‘I-think’ is empty. It also considers Kant’s understanding of the relation between his ‘I-think’ and Descartes’ cogito.

This chapter argues that the Second Meditation result “I am a thinking thing” is not the result “I am an immaterial thing” and is not the result “I am a thinking substance.” Most meditators are not yet in a position to arrive at the latter two results. The meditator abstracts an idea of mind from his pre-Meditations idea of self, but he does not exclude body from mind; nor does he conclude that minds are substances. The chapter considers theargument from doubt that is offered in Discourse on the Method and other texts and argues that the reason why Descartes is able to advance stronger conclusions in these is that he is in a more advanced epistemic position than his meditator. The Second Meditation meditator can perform abstraction but not exclusion, and as a result the Second Meditation does not include an argument for substance dualism. The chapter also argues that Descartes allows that “I am, I exist” and other claims of the cogito variety are dubitable so long as we are thinking them by way of the imagination. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role and placement of the wax digression.

This chapter examines Peter Markie's book, “Descartes Gambit,” Edwin Curley's work titled “Descartes Against the Skeptics” and the exchange of criticisms between the two works. The “gambit” Markie refers to in his title is Descartes' attempt to deduce a metaphysical theory of the self from premises about his knowledge of himself. The epistemological premises are that “I am certain that I think”, that “I am certain that I exist”, and that “I am uncertain that I have a body.” The metaphysical theory of the self derived from these premises is, roughly, that I am a thinking, nonextended substance capable of existing apart from its body. Markie maintains that Descartes himself held that these metaphysical conclusions could be deduced from these epistemological premises without establishing God's existence and veracity. The point of contention between the two works is on the definition and relationship of three species of Cartesian certainty— psychological, moral, and metaphysical.

This chapter describes how Descartes, after having gained the certainty of his existence as a thinking thing, derived from this first knowledge the general rule that allows him to become certain of anything, that is to say, to recognize truth, the rule which is often called the criterion of truth. The chapter presents truth as indubitable and therefore resisting any form of doubt. It affirms truth by reason of its existence and therefore it can be considered as exception or privileged truth. This chapter also explains that the basis of all truths is the existence of God and that the existence of God is the thing that secures the criterion of truth. The chapter also delves on the nature of the cogito, as something born directly out of metaphysical doubt, its fragile character, its exemplary and exceptional character.

This chapter attempts a phenomenological elucidation of what Descartes understood by the soul. In this aim, the presuppositions of classical phenomenology, either Husserlian or post-Husserlian, are not applied but instead, quite to the contrary, the chapter appropriates the Cartesian concept of the soul and thereby gives the idea of phenomenology a radical meaning. The chapter explains that the existence of the soul is based on the radical existence of the affirmation of Being. Another concept—that of appearing—is discussed. Appearing constitutes the standing-at-the-beginning of the Beginning, not insofar as it fashions the appearing of what appears, but only insofar as it appears first of all itself, in itself. The division between appearing and being is the Cartesian differentiation between soul and body. The soul finds its essence in appearing and properly speaking designates it, whereas the body is, in principle, properly devoid of the power of manifestation. This chapter also explains that the form of any thought is what we call Idea and that knowldege of the soul has primacy over knowledge of the body.

This chapter ventures into a deeper interpretation of the concept of cogito, ergo sum. The chapter begins with a presentation of the newly-reborn challenge and contact of Descartes' thoughts to contemporary philosophy. One such contact was Henry's use of “material phenomenology” to interpret Descartes' hermeneutic. The chapter emphasizes that this particular line gives access to an original and powerful understanding of the cogito, ergo sum, and not only that its phenomenological repetition pulls the Cartesian ego out of the aporias for which the greatest interpreters—Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger—had opposed it, but above all that this line opens absolutely new perspectives on the whole of Descartes' work. In particular, the chapter argues that it would in this way seem possible to reestablish, in the “I think, therefore I am” which generosity finally effects, the unity long missing between the love of wisdom and the search for truth.

The totality of Cartesian science is based on metaphysics, and two fundamental principles intersect within this metaphysics or first philosophy: one is called the cogito (I think, therefore I am; and I am a thinking substance); the other is called the divine veracity (God exists; and he cannot deceive me) This chapter visits what it considers as the most constant thesis in Descartes' metaphysics. The thesis is that the entire methodical structure of scientific knowledge depends on an assured knowledge of God. Descartes believes that he has found how one can demonstrate metaphysical truths in a manner that is more evident than the demonstrations of geometry, how one can demonstrate the existence of God in the same manner as one demonstrates a property of the triangle. The thesis however is a paradox in that it claims that God is asserted to be incomprehensible. It is because God is incomprehensible that the idea of him is also incomprehensible; and it is not even though this idea is incomprehensible, but rather because it is incomprehensible that it is the most clear and the most distinct of all.

This chapter discusses a re-emerging topic in Cartesian scholarship—mind and body interaction. A number of thinkers, from his contemporaries onward, have maintained that Descartes' account of his two substances rules out the possibility of the interaction that he attempted to defend. Often, however, the ground for asserting this impossibility has been left less than explicit. Recent discussion has attempted to clarify the issue by asking whether there can be specified grounds within Descartes' philosophy which are sufficient to rule out mind–body interaction. There are three elements of Descartes' thinking which might seem to create problems for mind–body interaction—his insistence that mind and body are absolutely distinct substances, his own restrictions on possible causal relations, and his views on the freedom of the will. Recent work has focused on the first two of these issues. The chapter's goal is to suggest that an essential element of Descartes' worldview has been overlooked in this recent discussion, and to show that once it is taken into account many of the apparent difficulties about Cartesian interaction can be resolved.

Discusses the Meditationes, its reception, and Descartes's response. In this work, Descartes avoided theological questions (except for the doctrine of transubstantiation). Describes the structure of the Principia, the culmination of his metaphysics dealing with the cogito, freedom of the will, divine predestination, inertial principles, the conservation of motion, dynamic relativism, and his theory of vortices, which he used to account for planetary orbits, weight or gravity, tides, and magnetism. Chronicles Descartes's religious controversy with Voetius and his dispute with Regius, whom he accused of plagiarizing his work.

The ‘naïve view’ of existence, according to which ‘exists’ is a genuine predicate, expressing a genuine property, is defended against the orthodox Russellian view, which maintains that to predicate existence of an object is really to say of some property that it is instantiated. It is argued that the orthodox view faces intractable problems, which the naïve view does not face, and that the latter fares better than the former in three specific contexts in which the notion of existence plays a central role: the cogito, essentialism, and the ontological argument.