Certainty the fact that he was one of the first to write on the topic and acted as a comparison for the traditional and definitive works of the Western tradition. Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy" is a book in which Descartes first discards all belief in things which are not absolutely certain, and then tries to establish what can be known for sure. Although the phrase "Cogito, ergo sum" is often attributed to Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy", it is actually put forward in his "Discourse on Method". Due to the implications of inferring the conclusion within the predicate, however, he
Cogito and the History of Madness at the end of the renaissance and the beginning of the classical age. He then discusses the treatment of madness by Descartes in the "Meditations on First Philosophy". Foucault argues that Descartes refuses to recognise a commonality between himself and people who are mad and uses this dissociation as an excuse not to take madness seriously as a grounds for doubt. For Foucault this exclusion of madness by Descartes leads to a cogito that is more or less arbitrarily self-assured of its own rationality. Derrida argues that Descartes might appear to dismiss madness at the point of the meditation to