b) '.... being is the first principle of all knowledge. ....
.. The classical objection to this statement is that, from such a vague
idea as that of being, no distinct knowledge can be deduced. This is true,
but it is not an objection. To describe being as the 'principle of knowledge',
does not mean that all subsequent knowledge can be analytically
deduced from it, but rather that being is the first knowledge,
through which all subsequent knowledge can be progressively acquired.'
Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience
(Scribner's, NY, 1937)p313.
c) 'And as all the detail [truths of fact or phenomena] only
contains other prior, or yet more detailed contingents each of which
also requires a similar analysis to provide its reason, one is no further
ahead. The sufficient or final reason must lie outside of the sequence
or series of the detail of contingencies, however infinite it may be. ....
.... And so the ultimate reason of things must be in a necessary substance
in which the detail of the changes is present only eminently, as in its
source. It is this that we call God.'
Leibniz, Monadology, section 37-38.
d) 'The mathematician Godel proved that a system of
axioms can never be based on itself: statements from outside the
system must be used in order to prove its consistency.'
Victor Weisskopf, Knowledge and Wonder (Freeman, N.Y.,1989) 64.
e) 'When the conditional is given to us, the unconditional
is posed before us as a problem.'
Kant
f) 'Why not be content without philosophizing, with what
we find in the world, with what already is, what stands there clear
before us? For this simple reason: all that there is, there in front of
us, given to us, present and clear, is in its very essence a mere piece,
a bit, a fragment, the stump of something absent. And we can not see
it without sensing and missing the part that is not there. In every given
being, every datum of the world, we find its essential fracture line,
its character as a part and only a part; we see the scar of its onto
logical mutilation; its ache of the amputated cries out at us, its
nostalgia for the bit that is lacking, its divine discontent.'
Jose Ortega y Gasset, What Is Philosophy (Norton, NY, 1960)p64.
g) '......by scanning beauty's wide horizon, he will be saved
from a slavish and illiberal devotion to the individual loveliness of
a single boy, a single man, or a single institution. And, turning his eyes
toward the open sea of beauty, he will find in such contemplation the
seed of the most fruitful discourse and the loftiest thought, and reap
a golden harvest of philosophy, until, confirmed and strengthened,
he will come upon one single form of knowledge, the knowledge of the
beauty I am about to speak of . ..... It is an everlasting loveliness which
neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades, for such beauty
is the same on every hand, the same then as now, here as there, this way
as that way, the same to every worshiper as it is to every other.
Nor will his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face, or of hands,
or of anything that is of the flesh. It will be neither words, nor knowledge ...
.... but subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness, while every
lovely thing partakes of it in such sort that, however much the parts may
wax and wane, it will be neither more nor less, but still the same inviolable
whole.... And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man's life is ever worth
the living, it is when he has attained this vision of [I think
the translation here should be "union with" instead of "vision of".] the very
soul of beauty.'
Plato, Symposium , 210D -211D (trans. Michael Joyce).