I've actually been wondering this ever since I read Descartes (I adore how pretentious that sounds). So for the whole intellectualism/skepticism/agnosticism whatnot, one must eliminate all a priori assumptions, no? But how does one get by with eliminating the assumption that the human intellect is in any way useful at discovering the truth? I mean, why should we possibly assume that that which seems logical to us has any correlation with reality? And if the answer is that it has seemed in the past to do so, then we just get circular because 1)why should we assume that 'past performance gaurantees future results' and 2) how do we know that the reality that was previously conceived actually meant anything?
Meaning that: how is it possible to eliminate one enormous a priori assumption when making any attempt to understand anything?
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Actually, Descartes says something more like "We must throw away all that we assume, starting after a certain young age. The common understanding is that he was saying that we don't need to question G-d's existence, in order that the Church not condemn his works.
So for the whole intellectualism/skepticism/agnosticism whatnot, one must eliminate all a priori assumptions, no?
To me this sentence is not clear. Question 1: are you saying that intellectualism = skepticism = agnosticism?
Question 2: is this post implying something having to do with religion or is it a general question?
Since I was educated as an engineer, I tend to view these questions in a fairly utilitarian light, though if I had to formalize it, I'd subscribe more to Karl Popper's view of theories. But in general what I mean is that for most of us, life works out pretty well by working off probabilities and approximations. Meaning, past performance may not guarantee future results, but many times there is a very high probability that it does. To borrow from Hume, we may not be able to prove that the Sun will come up tomorrow, but there is a high enough probability that I can base my life on it. Likewise, if I were to look at mathematics, there are a lot of problems that do not have solutions, but we can usually solve them by methods of approximation.
Richard- I know, Descartes was sort of cheating, but the question is in theory.
E-kvetcher- I wasn't attempting to equate them, but rather the question seemed valid for any one of those fields when they allege to eliminate all a priori assumptions. More honestly, I couldn't really pin down the word that I was looking for, so I sort of danced around it. Anyway, the question applies to any argument that claims to have eliminated a prioris.
Your tactic is my general point of view regarding all philosophy- our perception may not be accurate but it's close enough for all useful purposes. The problem is when you start trying to deal with the problems that can only be usefully dealt with philosophically- things like G-d and truth and all that jazz. I am willing to apply the 'close enough' approach to these fields as well, but the people advocating pure intellectualism rarely are. So what I was really wondering is how do they get around the problem.
It's hard to reply to the original question because I am still not sure which group of people you are addressing with your question. You seem to be talking about a very fundamental sort of rationalist philosophy, but I can't think of many people, philosophers or laymen who still subscribe to this. So to me it sounds like you're kinda attacking a strawman that you set up.
I guess that you may be right- there may be nobody who actually claims to have no assumptions at all. The only thing is that I'm really rather fond, theoretically speaking, of the idea of being able to accomplish anything through pure logic, without assumptions, both because it's cool and because it seems to make the whole philosophy thing so... neat . And so I think that it would be nice if there were any possible way for it to actually work. But the idea seems to be inherently self-defeating, which seems to me to be a bit of a pity.
I am not sure about formal logic in philosophy, but in math there are such things as Godel's Incompleteness Theorems and such, which show some of the limitations of formal proofs.
Not that I pretend to understand them very well...
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