'For the person or persons that hold dominion, can no more combine with the keeping up of majesty the running with harlots drunk or naked about the streets, or the performances of a stage player, or the open violation or contempt of laws passed by themselves than they can combine existence with non-existence'.

- Benedict de Spinoza. Political Treatise. 1677.




Monday, March 08, 2010

on certainty 327


327. So it might be said: “The reasonable man believes: that the earth has been there since long before his birth, that his life has been spent on the surface of the earth, or near it, that he has never, for example, been on the moon, that he has a nervous system an various innards like all other people, etc., etc.”



if you drop the rhetoric –

‘the reasonable man believes …’

what you have here –

is a series of propositions –

proposals

these propositions –

may well be generally agreed to –

nevertheless –

they are open to question –

and open to doubt –

and as such –

uncertain


© greg t.charlton. 2010.