Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

1. Introduction - Truth, Goodness

and Beauty

‘There is nothing so absurd which has not sometimes been asserted by some philosophers.’

Cicero

Philosophy was once divided into three broad categories — truth, goodness and beauty. It was the ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus who seems to have been the first to see these things as ends in themselves. For him, once any one of these is found then there is no need to search any further. But finding them! That is the issue! In this introduction I just want to take a brief look at those ‘big three’ by way of a lead into explaining the structure of the book.

The most basic of the three, concerning matters of truth — metaphysics and epistemology — was once referred to as ‘first philosophy’. For Aristotle, first philosophy meant the study of being, or being in itself. (The term ontology is now more commonly used for this.) For Descartes, philosophy is like a tree, whose roots are in metaphysics, the trunk physics and the branches are all the other sciences. He included ethics as a science. Also he saw metaphysics as

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