Does Philosophy Accept Self-Evident Truth?

[Recca Gatsby]

5 stars

 

[tmonster]

how about providing a test of proof instead of just thinking?

 

[tmonster]

nothing is self evident other than what you feel.
you feel, therefore you are.

everything else is questionable.

this is patently wrong

you can create a standard of self evidence based on repeatability of mechanism and predictive power of theory

 

[CHL]

Bump

 

[GPBear]

You cast a pretty wide net there breh, does "philosophy" accept self-evident truth. Then you bring up empirical observation, but empiricism and observation itself is a branch of philsophy (David Hume)

Meanwhile, I think you'd be hard pressed to get a nihilist or maybe even an existentialist (Kierkegaard/Nietzsche/Satre) to admit they have the ability to find truth within themselves (if that's what we're talking about).

Logical positivists, people in the Vienna School like Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein spent like 20 pages proving 1 + 1 = 2

Western Philosophy comes down to a grind between two tectonic plates of thought, on one side the empirical (American) Analytical philosophers that are rooted more in direct experience, and then you have the (European) Continental philosophers who are much more open to abstract theorizing. On this spectrum, the definitions of "self," "truth," and "evidence" are still being so hotly debated, that I think your question has too many variables to be answered genuinely.

edit: to be fair, I am coming at this from a pretty dated perspective, I'm sure the last 50 years some of those things have been hammered out more definitively

 

[Poh SIti Dawn]

I don't think Descartes was unsure of his being. I think he used his stream of consciousness as the definition of his being.

 

[Poh SIti Dawn]

The 'illusioned self' has no choice but to be the subject of that statement.

This is why i posed the question earlier in this thread "I wounder what descartes would have said if asked, If you are not thinking, are you there?"

What would you say?
What would you say is acting as the subject of such a statement? feel free to through your 2 cents in..

If you're not thinking then you're not thinking because at that moment in time you're not present in the sense of being. But not too many people can not think.