Cogito ergo sum

The Latin cogito ergo sum, usually translated into English as "I think, therefore I am", is the "first principle" of René Descartes's philosophy.

Quotes

• The Cartesian idea about the division between res cogitans and res extensa (consciousness and matter) which translates itself into a divide between the mind and the body or between the human and nature is preceded and even, one has the temptation to say, to some extent built upon an anthropological colonial difference between the ego conquistador and the ego conquistado. The very relationship between colonizer and colonized provided a new model to understand the relationship between the soul or mind and the body; and likewise, modern articulations of the mind/body are used as models to conceive the colonizer/colonized relation, as well as the relation between man and woman, particularly the woman of color.
  • Nelson Maldonado-Torres, "On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept," Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, Nos. 2-3, March/May 2007

• If the ego cogito was built upon the foundations of the ego conquiro, the ‘I think, therefore I am’ presupposes two unacknowledged dimensions. Beneath the ‘I think’ we can read ‘others do not think’, and behind the ‘I am’ it is possible to locate the philosophical justification for the idea that ‘others are not’ or do not have being.
  • Nelson Maldonado-Torres, "On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept," Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, Nos. 2-3, March/May 2007