Assumptions



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We feel we are stating a natural sequence of events when we say: this house was burned down because the lightning struck it. Primitive man senses an equally natural sequence when he says: a sorcerer has used the lightning to set fire to this particular house.

In explaining things in this way he is just like ourselves: he does not question his assumptions.

[C.G. Jung]
Modern Man In Search Of A Soul ('Archaic Man'), p.130



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[Popper] believes that philosophy is a necessary activity because we, all of us, take a great number of things for granted, and many of these assumptions are of a philosophical character; we act on them in private life, in politics, in out work, and in every other sphere of our lives - but while some of these assumptions are no doubt true, it is likely that more are false and some are harmful.

So the critical examination of our presuppositions - which is a philosophical activity - is morally as well as intellectually important.

[Bryan Magee]
Popper, p. 15


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Beyond Good and Evil begins with questions concerning the notion of truth, the possibility of certainty, the issue of freedom and necessity, and other traditional philosophical problems, and develops all of them into questions about the moral character of the person who, like most of us today, is more or less convinced by the traditional answers to them.

More accurately perhaps, Nietzsche tries to show how often and how unsuspectingly his readers have given answers to such questions, sometimes not even aware that these are questions at all and that these answers shape their everyday life.

But what he centrally objects to is not the specific answers these questions have been given but the very assumption that they are to be answered, and perhaps even asked, at all.

[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 26


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