Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

for now, we can note that in simple terms philosophy tries to make the world knowable through rationalism, science tries to make the world known through empiricism and religion (as generally understood) tries to make this and other worlds known by claiming there is revelation. I’ll be digging into all of these in a bit more detail in the chapters that follow. But note here that both rationalism and empiricism are variations on the first option above — they both assume that there is an external reality of some kind, which we can examine. The first of our options above is basically the ‘empiricist’ option — knowledge can be derived from sensation, impressions and observations.

But it’s here that the first problem in philosophy is encountered — because it can never be decided that the knowledge we gather from observation is really true. Philosopher R.B. Perry (Journal of Philosophy 1910) referred to the situation of not being able to know anyone’s but our own thoughts as the ‘egocentric predicament’. This seems to set up boundaries to our possible knowledge. The Preface to this book identifies the egocentric predicament as the fundamental problem of philosophy. The egocentric predicament is sometimes divided into theoretical egoism — only the self exists — and practical egoism — other selves exist, but nothing else about the world can be known. Solipsism, a term introduced above, is the name usually given to theoretical egoism.

René Descartes started from this point —with the belief in his own mind — leading to the most famous quote in philosophy: ‘I think, therefore I am’. From there he argued that reality was not

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