First principle foundationalist system of philosophy. He used the "method of doubt", now called Cartesian doubt, to systematically doubt everything he could possibly doubt, until he was left with what he saw as purely indubitable truths. Using these self-evident propositions as his axioms, or foundations, he went on to deduce his entire body of knowledge from them. The foundations are also called "a priori" truths. His most famous proposition is "Je pense, donc je suis." ("I think, therefore I am", or "Cogito ergo sum") Descartes describes the concept of a first principle in the following excerpt from the preface to the "Principles
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