Examples of Proposed Innate Knowledge
Innatism is invoked to explain how we can have knowledge of certain propositions that seem to go beyond experience, either (i) because of its universal applicability, or because (ii) its subject matter transcends experiential reality. Examples of the notions include:
- Ethical truths
- The notion of causality, that all events have a cause
- Notions of good and evil
- Logical and mathematical truths
- Metaphysical notions concerning transcendent objects like God or souls
- Avoidance of hazards (such as heights or potential sources of contagious disease)
Read more about this topic: Innatism
Famous quotes containing the words examples of, examples, proposed, innate and/or knowledge:
“There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring ‘em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifry.”
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)
“No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.”
—André Breton (1896–1966)
“I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, this and this I have learned; thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“That Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or another, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“And, beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)