Gómez Pereira Gómez Pereira Gómez Pereira (1500–1567) was a Spanish philosopher, doctor, and natural humanist from Medina del Campo. Pereira worked hard to dispel medieval concepts of medicine and proposed the application of empirical methods; as for his philosophy, it is of the standard direction and his reasonings are a clear precedent of René Descartes. He was the first to propose the famous ""Cogito ergo sum"", in 1554, commonly attributed to Descartes. He was famous for his practice of medicine, although he had many diverse occupations, such as owning businesses, engineering, and philosophy. Not much is known of his life, because there
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