Descartes is considered the founder of modern early modern rationalism, which Baruch de Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz continued in a critical-constructive manner. His rationalistic thinking is also called Cartesianism. From him comes the famous dictum "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am."), which forms the basis of his metaphysics, but also introduced self-consciousness as a genuine philosophical subject. The assumption that the thinking soul is the source of cognition has three implications: First, the source of all cognition is no longer to be sought in the tracing of God's thoughts; second, the thinking self makes the body an object of the body world like others (body-soul dualism);...