Hagia Filosofia

Descartes is well known to have remarked, cogito ergo sum, “I am thinking, therefore I am.” If I say it and try to disprove it, I affirm it.

Yet Georg Christoph Lichtenberg offered an interesting counterpoint. Perhaps Descartes went too far and could only assert the existence of thought, with ‘it is thinking,’ in the analogy of ‘it is raining.’ There can thinking going on but why assume the existence of a thinker?

Is Lichtenberg’s objection legitimate? Thoughts cannot exist without a thinker. Thought, unlike rain, is a state or property. Properties cannot exist without an object to instantiate them. Properties inhere objects but not the other way around. Things can change according to its properties but properties remain constant. My couch is blue but over time it will fade to a light blue. But the universal meaning of blue will not change. Things are known through their properties, but properties are known in themselves.

Lichtenberg’s rebuttal is valued not through it’s truth-value, but instead in the way it frames the problematic approach of separating reality into two: properties and things, or universals and particulars. More to come later.