French philosophy could be placed and progressively built. Thus he rejected anything which appeared uncertain and decided to only accept apodeictic knowledge as truth. After invoking the possibility of an omnipotent deceiver to reject the external world, the information given to him from his senses, mathematics and logic, Descartes discovered at least one thing could be known apodictically. If he himself was doubting, then he had to exist. Thus Cogito Ergo Sum - I think, therefore I am - became the first principle of Cartesianism. Descartes then claimed that because he discovered the Cogito through perceiving it clearly and distinctly, anything 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