Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

pin down. It’s a common experience to be in that place of asking whether the world really exists! Kant himself divided philosophy into the formal and the material. The formal (he called it ‘formal philosophical logic’) was to define the concepts that lay beyond the world (and I’ll be explaining this view in more detail later). Kant’s ‘material’ division of philosophy, interestingly, included both physics and ethics (natural and moral philosophy). So there is something similar to Francis Hutcheson here, with ethics potentially open to the same kind of scrutiny as nature. From Kant (and following Plotinus) we also have the three divisions of philosophy that were explored in the Introduction — truth, goodness and beauty — reflected in the names of his three ‘critiques’. The Critique of Pure Reason (truth), The Critique of Practical Reason (goodness/morality) and The Critique of Judgement (beauty).

Both our common-sense view of reality and, for the most part, the scientific view make the assumption of the independent existence of objective reality. How can there be certainty that statements about the world are true? How can it be known that what is true for us is also true for others? How can it be known that the deductions that science makes are true? What makes a scientific theory true or false? Beliefs regarding the existence or otherwise of an external world can be summarised as follows:

1. There is an external world, which is experienced very much as it is and experienced in a similar manner to other people. This might be described as the common-sense view of reality. (‘Realism’, or ‘metaphysical realism’ or

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