Sublime

most plausible or defensible—

Even a strong inductive argument from indisputable evidence is open to refutation unless we are assured that it has taken account of all relevant evidence.

“To be is to be perceived,” said the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753). We exist and give existence by virtue of perception. Berkeley meant that God’s omniscient perception maintains all things. For a moralist—and Berkeley was a bishop—this could mean you’re never out of the sight of God, so you’d better be good! For a metaphysician, “E

He maintained that material objects only exist through being perceived. To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we l

Since scientific knowledge requires proof, and any proof has to start from unproven assumptions, intuitive reason (nous) is needed as the grasp of these starting points for the deductive reasoning he takes scientific knowledge to require.

Philosophy begins, and in my view must end, as an attempt to answer real questions asked by real people.

Principle of Relevant Evidence.

The Christian philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), in fact, proposed an argument that was intended, in a very complicated and ingenious way, to transform this venerable philosophical intuition into something like a comprehensive philosophical proof, one that moved from the “unrestricted intelligibility” of reality to the reality of God as the