Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

justification?

Put this way, perhaps it’s more obvious how hideously unsocialised such a person would be! I leave it to the reader to decide how common or uncommon this might be.

I close this chapter simply by noting the ideas around the word ‘innate’ that have arisen over the course of this and the preceding chapter. Innate can mean several different things — innate to the universe, innate to our mapping of the universe, innate to our animal nature or innate to our cultured, rational selves. This, along with the notion of ‘embodiment’ will be taken up again in the next section and in the next chapter on Beauty.

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To summarise this section on truth, it might be said, ‘the truth is out there’, even although there is little certainty about ever finding it! Yet despite the onslaughts of scepticism and pragmatism there is a persistent belief in the existence of an essential truth. We love the axioms and the laws of physics. Yet I suspect we also love the idea of mystery — that some truths might be forever hidden yet still work their effects in our world.

Could the human quest for truth ever be successful? Gödel’s theorems suggest that no system can ever be understood from within the system itself. (Kurt Gödel seemed to be trying to get to something close to the idea of Platonic forms in his work, but many have interpreted what he did in different ways. For a good

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