Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

that mysterianism doesn’t have to be about God or spirits or other supernatural things — I’m defining it as anything that takes us beyond what presents itself as plain fact. This, as I’ve suggested earlier, links in with our theme of essence. Science is always going beyond itself — trying to find some big explanation of how all the things that have been discovered fit together. Science (and/or the writers of popular science books) go even beyond this and try to find — not just grand explanations — but meanings and purposes as well. So these are the narratives seeking to find ‘essential truths’ about the way the world presents itself to us.

We might usefully summarise all of the truth-seeking methods with descriptions based partly on Felipe Fernande-Armesto’s book, Truth:

The truth that we imagine = Idealism The truth that we perceive = Empiricism The truth that we construct = Rationalism The truth that coheres = Coherentism The truth that corresponds = Corresponence The truth that we agree = Pragmatism The truth that we embody = Phenomenology The truth that we feel = Mysterianism The truth that we doubt = Scepticism

Scepticism doubts everything whilst pragmatism doesn’t care if things are really true or not, so that leaves us with seven categories.

Having established our alternative foundations, it’s time to dive a little deeper into truth and knowledge, to see where these will lead us.

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