Sublime

Philosophy

I can summarize a thousand years of moral philosophy in a few sentences: pre–Hobbes and Bentham, human nature was viewed as a battle between our desire to be good and our temptations to behave badly, and the gist of moral philosophy and religious faith was that we should treat each other as we want to be treated ourselves—the golden rule—and we

The Stoics held that there are certain principles which are luminously obvious, and are admitted by all men; these could be made, as in Euclid’s Elements, the basis of deduction. Innate ideas, similarly, could be used as the starting-point of definitions. This point of view was accepted throughout the Middle Ages, and even by Descartes.

In Locke’s own day, his chief philosophical opponents were the Cartesians and Leibniz.

To think, to dig into the foundations of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction.

Taylor. He’s careful throughout to avoid asking about the truth of the ideas he discusses. That is appropriate as his task is descriptive and explanatory.

It should be observed that Scepticism as a philosophy is not merely doubt, but what may be called dogmatic doubt. The man of science says “I think it is so-and-so, but I am not sure.” The man of intellectual curiosity says “I don’t know how it is, but I hope to find out.” The philosophical Sceptic says “nobody knows, and nobody ever can know.” It