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, ergo sum and that "I" know what "thinking" is. He suggested a more appropriate phrase would be "it thinks" wherein the "it" could be an impersonal subject as in the sentence "It is raining." The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard calls the phrase a tautology in his "Concluding Unscientific Postscript". He argues that the "cogito" already presupposes the existence of "I", and therefore concluding with existence is logically trivial. Kierkegaard's argument can be made clearer if one extracts the premise "I think" into the premises "'x' thinks" and "I am that 'x'", where "x" is used as a placeholder in order to disambiguate