Cogito Ergo Sum

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.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Susan James 3 episodes
  Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London
• John Cottingham 2 episodes
  Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading and Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London
• Stephen Mulhall 8 episodes
  Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford

Related episodes

• The Mind/Body Problem
  
  13 Jan, 2005 120 Epistemology
• Common Sense Philosophy
  
  21 Jun, 2007 100 Philosophy
• The Ontological Argument
  
  27 Sep, 2012 100 Philosophy
• Existentialism
  
  28 Jun, 2001 100 Philosophy
• Kant’s Copernican Revolution
  
  3 Jun, 2021 100 Philosophy
• Imagination and Consciousness
  
  29 Jun, 2000 120 Epistemology
• Consciousness
  
  25 Nov, 1999 120 Epistemology
• Scepticism
  
  5 Jul, 2012 100 Philosophy
• Empiricism
  
  10 Jun, 2004 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Bishop Berkeley
  
  20 Mar, 2014 100 Philosophy

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b010mvcp

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010mvcp

Auto-category: 190 (Modern Western philosophy (19th-century philosophy to the present))

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, there are a few sentences in the history of philosophy that have become as famous as their authors.