The seventeenth-century French physicist, mathematician, and philosopher René Descartes, in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, sought ultimate certainty. He reasoned that everything was open to doubt, including whether the outside world existed or whether he had a body. That he was experiencing something, though, even if the precise character of what he was experiencing was delusional, was a certainty. Descartes concluded that because he was conscious, he existed: Je pense, donc je suis, later translated as cogito, ergo sum, or I
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