Cogito, ergo sum though not explicitly as "cogito, ergo sum" in Meditation II: In 1644, Descartes published (in Latin) his "Principles of Philosophy" where the phrase "ego cogito, ergo sum" appears in Part 1, article 7: Descartes's margin note for the above paragraph is: Descartes, in a lesser-known posthumously published work dated as written ca. 1647 and titled ("The Search for Truth by Natural Light"), wrote: The proposition is sometimes given as . This fuller form was penned by the eloquent French literary critic, Antoine Léonard Thomas, in an award-winning 1765 essay in praise of Descartes, where it appeared as In English, this
Cogito, ergo sum in the former case, and an objective thinker in the latter. He argues, first, that it is impossible to make sense of "there is thinking" without relativizing it to "something." However, this something cannot be Cartesian egos, because it is impossible to differentiate objectively between things just on the basis of the pure content of consciousness. The obvious problem is that, through introspection, or our experience of consciousness, we have no way of moving to conclude the existence of any third-personal fact, to conceive of which would require something above and beyond just the purely subjective contents of the mind.