Philosophy in turmoil following newly discovered Cartesian principle

By Tangleberry Waldorf-Salad

The discovery of a new manuscript by Rene Descartes has stunned philosophers worldwide and threatens to undermine four hundred years of progress.

The previously unknown document, Meditationes de secondo philosophia, was found by builders restoring the fire-ravaged Notre Dame cathedral and contains an update to the Descartes’ famous maxim ‘I think, therefore I am’, written in his own hand.

“The Cartesian first principle of cogito ergo sum has been accepted as a key element of philosophical investigation,” said Engelbert P. Wittgenfunk of the Ffossip Society of Philosophy.

“We were therefore stunned to find, scribbled in the margins of Meditationes, an entirely new but indubitably genuine new maxim Sed quid ego novi te, or, in English ‘I know you are but what am I?’ ”

“It shows that even in his later years Decartes was busy refining his ideas of foundational knowledge and rationalist methodology and provides us with another phenomenological question with which to wrestle.”

Professor Wittgenfunk added that philosophers across the world were busy trying to find a definition for the words “I”, “Know”, “You”, “Are”, “But, “What” and “Am”, after which analysis could proceed to the next stage.

 

Previous finds

In 2005 builders working on a public toilet in Frankfurt dug up the partially rotted manuscript of Phanomelogie de Geistes which under further inspection was confirmed to be a new version of Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel’s 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit. In the margins, in an unknown hand, was scrawled Man muss genauso sein um es zu verstehen.

For the last fifteen years, scholars have been arguing as to how to interpret the words. They were eventually provisionally decoded as ‘it takes one to know one’ by the 2020 Council of Philosophers.

Perhaps the most famous of all example is an inscription on a seemingly innocuous set of scraps of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Originally seen as separate and unintelligible possible test pen strokes, the breakthrough came in 1961 when researchers repositioned the scraps to reveal a new teaching on self-worth.

“תפסיק להכות את עצמך. למה אתה מכה בעצמך?” was translated after decades of debate as “Stop hitting yourself. Why are you hitting yourself?” and attributed tentatively as an addendum to the Sermon on the Mount.