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 Translation needs a larger context to determine aspect. Following John Lyons (1982), Vladimir Žegarac notes, "The temptation to use the simple present is said to arise from the lack of progressive forms in Latin and French, and from a misinterpretation of the meaning of "cogito" as habitual or generic." (Cf. gnomic aspect.) Ann Banfield writes (also following Lyons), "In order for the statement on which Descartes's argument depends to represent certain knowledge, … its tense must be a true present—in English, a progressive, … not as 'I think' but as 'I am thinking, in conformity with the general translation of