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, ergo sum and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I think that I am something. So, after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that the proposition, "I am, I exist," is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. (AT VII 25; CSM II 16–17) There are three important notes to keep in mind here. First, he claims only the certainty of "his own" existence from the first-person point of view — he has not proved the existence