Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

1. Introduction

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

Cicero

From Immanuel Kant (and following Plotinus) we have the three divisions of philosophy — truth, beauty and goodness — reflected in the names of his three ‘critiques’, The Critique of Pure Reason (truth), The Critique of Judgement (beauty) and The Critique of Practical Reason (goodness/morality). 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, was once referred to as ‘first philosophy’. A variety of subjects have been included under this heading. They include the study of being, metaphysics (including such matters as scepticism, the existence of God and the nature of the soul), the meaning of things and somethings, seeing the universe as The One, and also the study of the roots of ethics — what we now describe as meta-ethics. Robert Pirsig, in his book Lila, gave a very apt list of questions that metaphysics deals with. These are: Are the objects we perceive real or illusory? Does the external world exist apart from our

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