Cogito, ergo sum Cogito, ergo sum This proposition became a fundamental element of Western philosophy, as it purported to form a secure foundation for knowledge in the face of radical doubt. While other knowledge could be a figment of imagination, deception, or mistake, Descartes asserted that the very act of doubting one's own existence served—at minimum—as proof of the reality of one's own mind; there must be a thinking entity—in this case the self—for there to be a thought. Descartes first wrote the phrase in French in his 1637 "Discourse on the Method". He referred to it in Latin without explicitly stating the
Cogito and the History of Madness translation of the text into English as "Madness and Civilization". The abridged 1964 edition removed the pages concerning Descartes on which Derrida had explicitly based his argument in "Cogito and the History of Madness." These pages on Descartes were only made available in English with Jean Khalfa's 2006 translation of Foucault's work on madness. Derrida makes an allusion to the master–slave dialectic in Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" in the opening pages of "Cogito and the History of Madness." Foucault writes at the start of the second chapter of the "History of Madness" of a strange violent event that silenced madness