Question

But what am i? A thinking being.What is a thinking being? It is a being which doubts, which understands, which conceives, which affirms . . ."

Answer 1

Answer:

By "thought" he tells us, he means to refer to anything marked by awareness or consciousness. ... Having proved that he is a thinking being, Descartes then goes on to prove that we know the existence of the mind better than we know the existence of body.

Explanation:

René Descartes (1596–1650) was a French philosopher and mathematician, credited as a foundational thinker in the development of Western notions of reason and science. His philosophy was built on the idea of radical doubt, in which nothing that is perceived or sensed is necessarily true. The only thing that remains true that there is a mind or consciousness doing the doubting and believing its perceptions, hence the famous formulation, ‘I think therefore I am’, or in Latin, the cogito—‘Cogito ergo sum’. Descartes also proposed that the mind and body were two separate and distinct entities, but even the body was not so certain a thing as the mind, because, like everything else in the world, the body could only be sensed because there was a mind to sense it. In 1663, Descartes’ writings were placed on a list of prohibited books by the Pope, because of the central place Descartes gave to reason and mind, rather than God, in his philosophy.