Reasoning Through Time: Cartesian Insights

This reading resolves one of the most vexed questions in Cartesian scholarship: in Descartes’s cogito — “I am thinking, therefore I am” — is “I am” intuited or inferred? (The answer is both.) And drawing on recent cognitive science, Descartes was right about how much information we can focus on, and how a certain kind of memory works to supplement our focus as we reason through time.