Cogers Cogers The Society of Cogers (pronounced KOE-jers) is a free speech society, established in 1755 in the City of London. It is the oldest debating society in the world and one of the oldest speaking gatherings of any kind. The name "Cogers" comes from Descartes' famous assertion, "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). As a "Society of Thinkers", the Cogers is dedicated to the philosophy of letting everyone express their thoughts. The aims of the Cogers were the promotion of the liberty of the subject and the freedom of the Press, the maintenance of loyalty to the laws,
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.