Cogito, ergo sum “I am thinking, therefore I exist” appears in the CSMK translation of Descartes's correspondence in French (“, ”) to colleagues at CSMK III 247. The earliest known translation as "I am thinking, therefore I am" is from 1872 by Charles Porterfield Krauth. As put compactly by Prof. Krauth (1872), "That cannot doubt which does not think, and that cannot think which does not exist. I doubt, I think, I exist." The phrase "cogito, ergo sum" is not used in Descartes's "Meditations on First Philosophy" but the term "the "cogito"" is used to refer to an argument from it. In the
Cogito, ergo sum the "I" from the thinking thing. Here, the "cogito" has already assumed the "I"'s existence as that which thinks. For Kierkegaard, Descartes is merely "developing the content of a concept", namely that the "I", which already exists, thinks. As Kierkegaard argues, the proper logical flow of argument is that existence is already assumed or presupposed in order for thinking to occur, not that existence is concluded from that thinking. Bernard Williams claims that what we are dealing with when we talk of thought, or when we say "I am thinking," is something conceivable from a third-person perspective; namely objective "thought-events"