In Book XXVI of The Library of History, written in the second half of the first century BCE, the historian Diodorus Siculus relates some enduring anecdotes about Archimedes, the famous Greek mathematician and inventor. Prominent among these is the story of Archimedes supposedly having often said: “Give me a place to stand and I shall move the whole world.” This may be a complete invention, but the phrase has stuck. Descartes famously refers to his cogito ergo sum as an Archimedean point. For Descartes the Archimedean point was the lever that would allow him to move the world. More generally, an Archimedean point is a fixed perspective that provides intellectual leverage.