>Descartes, teachers never do so. When I was taught Descartes, the flimsiness of the whole 'cogito' thing was really emphasised. I actually don't think I've ev

>Descartes, teachers never do so. When I was taught Descartes, the flimsiness of the whole 'cogito' thing was really emphasised. I actually don't think I've ever heard of anybody in the philosophy world who took the binding between personal existence and thought as any kind of raw fact, at least not in the terms Descartes proposed. Most of the treatments I (vaguely) remember were about the interesting observation, implicit in the Meditations, that there's something unusual about existential predicates. I think if you stop thinking of philosophy as a body of answers, and more as a body of in-depth examinations of questions, then it gets good again. It's a bit like maths - nobody would ever suggest that the concept of a Heesh number is an answer to a particular kind of question. It's more an interesting way to talk about tiling.