Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

necessary truths, has to deal with the fact that this seems not to be possible. The alternative is that boundaries must be set within which truth-claims are limited. But Western culture is largely under the sway of a belief in absolute truth, expressed now as ‘scientism’. No boundaries to truth or knowledge are recognised. Proper science however — that is, where the scientific method is carefully applied — would see our knowledge as a working hypothesis. This gives us a useful boundary. Most, if not all, of the alternatives discussed below have boundaries within which they express their particular type of truth. But as with scientism, the boundaries often go unacknowledged.

Many of the truth-seeking methods I’ve been describing in this work start with observation and then move swiftly to rationalism — trying to form coherent theories about the way the world works. From this there is sometimes even a leap to deriving meaning, values, ethics and morality from the truth that has been obtained. I have tried below to arrange the descriptions of the various narratives in such a way that they follow this pattern. So the first place to go is with the view that seems the most obvious one from the point of view of the ‘egocentric predicament’ with which we started the book. That is, the view that we know nothing outside our own minds, and thus, must suspect that everything else is illusion.

Idealism

Idealism is the idea that reality only exists in the mind. Idealism is, if you will, a resolution of

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