One of the persisting problems of philosophy is how to bring together the idea of universal truth with the idea of personal truth. At their extremes, each idea tries to eliminate any room for the other. At one extreme, the idea of universal truth excludes those who do not accept a particular …
Alfred North Whitehead and wisdom
Alfred North Whitehead Wisdom combines truths of science, philosophy, and spiritual experience. Excellent thinking flourishes on the basis of intuition. On that basis, reason draws inferences. Then wisdom integrates reason's diverse array of such lines of reasoning into an ever more comprehensive …
Thomas Aquinas and reasoning
Notre Dame, Paris In commercial and political messages, when we see any reasoning at all, most of it is one-sided. The conclusion may be true, but there is no attempt to be fair to other points of view. By contrast, an editorial I once read distinguished itself: at the beginning, the writer …
Intuition and mistakes
A point raised in Dr. McCoy’s comment on the previous post, “Descartes and intuition,” deserves a fresh post in reply. There is no silver bullet when it comes to knowledge, wisdom, and insight. We have to work at it. We gain the truths of science by experiment, the truths of philosophy by …
Descartes and intuition
The method of thinking proposed by René Descartes is instructive. He proposed intuition and reason (deduction) as the way to wisdom. “Concerning the objects presented to us we should investigate, not what others have thought nor what we ourselves conjecture, but what we can intuit clearly and …
Dostoevsky and Aristotle, skepticism and intuition
Dostoevsky Aristotle Living at our best, we go forth upon the field of experience, and in various kinds of interaction we cope in a way that is grounded, poised, and intuitive. Aristotle saw that we need a kind of courage to establish intuition (or is there a kind of intuition at the …
Continue Reading about Dostoevsky and Aristotle, skepticism and intuition
