Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

particularly problematic when it comes to such things as values and morals, and we will be looking at further meanings of intuition later in the work.

And finally there is scepticism (which I’m not considering to be a type of truth-seeking at all). Part of the sceptics argument relates to matters we have already explored above — the seemingly impossible task of knowing anything about the world beyond its apparent qualities. Science includes a certain amount of scepticism, since, in theory at least, nothing is believed without experiment — and then only accepted contingently. But the critics of the search for truth and meaning must themselves assume truth, free will, fairness and the relevance of subjectivity, even when they’re arguing that these things don’t exist!

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 corresponds = Correspondence The truth that coheres = Coherentism The truth that we agree = Pragmatism The truth that we embody = Phenomenology The truth that we feel = Mysterianism The truth that we doubt = Scepticism

Our main concerns, going forward, will be with empiricism, rationalism, correspondence and coherence. Later in the work we’ll be turning to mysterianism, phenomenology and pragmatism.

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