Question: What years did the person who said "I think, therefore I am" live?

full_context: Document 1: Vacuum: Almost two thousand years after Plato, René Descartes also proposed a geometrically based alternative theory of atomism, without the problematic nothing–everything dichotomy of void and atom. Although Descartes agreed with the contemporary position, that a vacuum does not occur in nature, the success of his namesake coordinate system and more implicitly, the spatial–corporeal component of his metaphysics would come to define the philosophically modern notion of empty space as a quantified extension of volume. By the ancient definition however, directional information and magnitude were conceptually distinct. With the acquiescence of Cartesian mechanical philosophy to the "brute fact" of action at a distance, and at length, its successful reification by force fields and ever more sophisticated geometric structure, the anachronism of empty space widened until "a seething ferment" of quantum activity in the 20th century filled the vacuum with a virtual pleroma.
Document 2: Cogito, ergo sum: Cogito ergo sum is a Latin philosophical proposition by René Descartes usually translated into English as ``I think, therefore I am ''. The phrase originally appeared in French as je pense, donc je suis in his Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed. It appeared in Latin in his later Principles of Philosophy. As Descartes explained,`` we can not doubt of our existence while we doubt...'' A fuller form, penned by Antoine Léonard Thomas, aptly captures Descartes's intent: dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum (``I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am ''). The concept is also sometimes known as the cogito.
Document 3: Stephen Menn: Stephen Menn (born 1964) is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University and, between 2011 and 2015, was Professor of Ancient and Contemporary Philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin and the author of "Descartes and Augustine" about the origin of Descartes' "cogito". His specialties include ancient philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism and neo-Platonism), medieval philosophy (Western and Islamic). He is also a mathematician, holding a doctorate in Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1985 and one in Philosophy from University of Chicago in 1989.
Document 4: Philosophy of mind: In Western Philosophy, the earliest discussions of dualist ideas are in the writings of Plato who maintained that humans' ``intelligence ''(a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, their physical body. However, the best - known version of dualism is due to René Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-extended, non-physical substance, a`` res cogitans''. Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self - awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence. He was therefore the first to formulate the mind -- body problem in the form in which it still exists today.
Document 5: Mind–body dualism: Dualism is closely associated with the thought of René Descartes (1641), which holds that the mind is a nonphysical -- and therefore, non-spatial -- substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self - awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence. Hence, he was the first to formulate the mind -- body problem in the form in which it exists today. Dualism is contrasted with various kinds of monism. Substance dualism is contrasted with all forms of materialism, but property dualism may be considered a form of emergent materialism or non-reductive physicalism in some sense.
Document 6: Age of Enlightenment: There is little consensus on the precise beginning of the Age of Enlightenment; the beginning of the 18th century (1701) or the middle of the 17th century (1650) are often used as epochs. French historians usually place the period, called the Siècle des Lumières (Century of Enlightenments), between 1715 and 1789, from the beginning of the reign of Louis XV until the French Revolution. If taken back to the mid-17th century, the Enlightenment would trace its origins to Descartes' Discourse on Method, published in 1637. In France, many cited the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687. It is argued by several historians and philosophers that the beginning of the Enlightenment is when Descartes shifted the epistemological basis from external authority to internal certainty by his cogito ergo sum published in 1637. As to its end, most scholars use the last years of the century, often choosing the French Revolution of 1789 or the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment.
Document 7: Age of Enlightenment: French historians traditionally place the Enlightenment between 1715, the year that Louis XIV died, and 1789, the beginning of the French Revolution. Some recent historians begin the period in the 1620s, with the start of the scientific revolution. The Philosophes, the French term for the philosophers of the period, widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons and coffee houses, and through printed books and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the church, and paved the way for the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, trace their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment.
Document 8: Materialism: The French cleric Pierre Gassendi (1592-1665) represented the materialist tradition in opposition to the attempts of René Descartes (1596-1650) to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. There followed the materialist and atheist abbé Jean Meslier (1664-1729), Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the German-French Paul-Henri Thiry Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), the Encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713-1784), and other French Enlightenment thinkers; as well as (in England) John "Walking" Stewart (1747-1822), whose insistence in seeing matter as endowed with a moral dimension had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
Document 9: Avicenna: While he was imprisoned in the castle of Fardajan near Hamadhan, Avicenna wrote his famous "Floating Man" – literally falling man – thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantiality and immateriality of the soul. Avicenna believed his "Floating Man" thought experiment demonstrated that the soul is a substance, and claimed humans cannot doubt their own consciousness, even in a situation that prevents all sensory data input. The thought experiment told its readers to imagine themselves created all at once while suspended in the air, isolated from all sensations, which includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies. He argued that, in this scenario, one would still have self-consciousness. Because it is conceivable that a person, suspended in air while cut off from sense experience, would still be capable of determining his own existence, the thought experiment points to the conclusions that the soul is a perfection, independent of the body, and an immaterial substance. The conceivability of this "Floating Man" indicates that the soul is perceived intellectually, which entails the soul's separateness from the body. Avicenna referred to the living human intelligence, particularly the active intellect, which he believed to be the hypostasis by which God communicates truth to the human mind and imparts order and intelligibility to nature. Following is an English translation of the argument:
Document 10: Cogito, ergo sum: Cogito, ergo sum is a Latin philosophical proposition by René Descartes usually translated into English as ``I think, therefore I am ''. The phrase originally appeared in French as je pense, donc je suis in his Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed. It appeared in Latin in his later Principles of Philosophy. As Descartes explained,`` we can not doubt of our existence while we doubt...'' A fuller version, articulated by Antoine Léonard Thomas, aptly captures Descartes's intent: dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum (``I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am ''). The concept is also sometimes known as the cogito.
Document 11: Materialism: Some modern day physicists and science writers—such as Paul Davies and John Gribbin—have argued that materialism has been disproven by certain scientific findings in physics, such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory. In 1991, Gribbin and Davies released their book The Matter Myth, the first chapter of which, "The Death of Materialism", contained the following passage:
Document 12: Materialism: The German materialist and atheist anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach would signal a new turn in materialism through his book, The Essence of Christianity (1841), which provided a humanist account of religion as the outward projection of man's inward nature. Feuerbach's materialism would later heavily influence Karl Marx.
Document 13: Humanism: Davies identifies Paine's The Age of Reason as "the link between the two major narratives of what Jean-François Lyotard calls the narrative of legitimation": the rationalism of the 18th-century Philosophes and the radical, historically based German 19th-century Biblical criticism of the Hegelians David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach. "The first is political, largely French in inspiration, and projects 'humanity as the hero of liberty'. The second is philosophical, German, seeks the totality and autonomy of knowledge, and stresses understanding rather than freedom as the key to human fulfilment and emancipation. The two themes converged and competed in complex ways in the 19th century and beyond, and between them set the boundaries of its various humanisms. Homo homini deus est ("The human being is a god to humanity" or "god is nothing [other than] the human being to himself"), Feuerbach had written.
Document 14: Scientia potentia est: The phrase ``scientia potentia est ''(or`` scientia est potentia'' or also ``scientia potestas est '') is a Latin aphorism meaning`` knowledge is power''. It is commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, although there is no known occurrence of this precise phrase in Bacon's English or Latin writings. However, the expression ``ipsa scientia potestas est ''('knowledge itself is power') occurs in Bacon's Meditationes Sacrae (1597). The exact phrase`` scientia potentia est'' was written for the first time in the 1668 version of the work Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, who was secretary to Bacon as a young man.
Document 15: Age of Enlightenment: A number of novel ideas about religion developed with the Enlightenment, including Deism and talk of atheism. Deism, according to Thomas Paine, is the simple belief in God the Creator, with no reference to the Bible or any other miraculous source. Instead, the Deist relies solely on personal reason to guide his creed, which was eminently agreeable to many thinkers of the time. Atheism was much discussed, but there were few proponents. Wilson and Reill note that, "In fact, very few enlightened intellectuals, even when they were vocal critics of Christianity, were true atheists. Rather, they were critics of orthodox belief, wedded rather to skepticism, deism, vitalism, or perhaps pantheism." Some followed Pierre Bayle and argued that atheists could indeed be moral men. Many others like Voltaire held that without belief in a God who punishes evil, the moral order of society was undermined. That is, since atheists gave themselves to no Supreme Authority and no law, and had no fear of eternal consequences, they were far more likely to disrupt society. Bayle (1647–1706) observed that in his day, "prudent persons will always maintain an appearance of [religion].". He believed that even atheists could hold concepts of honor and go beyond their own self-interest to create and interact in society. Locke said that if there were no God and no divine law, the result would be moral anarchy: every individual "could have no law but his own will, no end but himself. He would be a god to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will the sole measure and end of all his actions".
ground_truth: 1596-1650
sub_queries: where did i think therefore i am come from Answer: René Descartes
René Descartes lived from what year to what year? Answer: 1596-1650