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 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