Rhetorical Analysis Of Cogito Ergo Sum I Think...

Cogito Ergo Sum: I think therefore, I am. Descartes’ paradigm-shifting assertion that the foundational belief and the only purely true instance of knowledge we possess is that we are a thinking thing and our mind’s ability to think is true. This is the quintessential belief of Cartesian skepticism, or whether we can know anything with certainty, and is achieved through a perspective of understanding external world knowledge rooted in doubting wholeheartedly what our senses say is true. Renà © Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy preface this doubt by establishing a criterion to facilitate his dismantling of his experiences, to prove if what he â€Å"knows† is actually the truth and not merely opinion or belief. This†¦show more content†¦In the second stage, Descartes rejects the idea that one can have certainty of his actions because when he is dreaming, everything that is not real appears to be real. A possible rejection to this argument could be that dreams are always chaotic and obviously not of reality, but Descartes argues that this is simply not true, for he has at times been dreaming that he was in his nightgown, sitting by the fire, and then woke up to realize that he was lying in bed, dreaming. In the third collective stage of doubt, Descartes presents an idea of a malicious demon and claims that if there were a God that was the cause of everything in the world, then it is possible that this demon deceives the mind into thinking the deceptive ideals. He then concludes that because God is a benevolent God, it would be contradictory of his nature to be a deceiver, and therefore God is not a deceiver, and there is no malicious demon. These stages of doubt chartered Descartesà ¢â‚¬â„¢ doubts to the single â€Å"apple† at the bottom of the basket that isn’t rotten: the one that states we think for, when we doubt, we cannot doubt that we doubt. Our minds themselves may exist separate in purgatory. From this premise he builds upon his experience, reconstructing his â€Å"basket of apples† until the rotten ones are removed, being left with pure true