According to many of Descartes ' specialists, including Étienne Gilson, the goal of Descartes in establishing this first truth is to demonstrate the capacity of his criterion — the immediate clarity and distinctiveness of self-evident propositions — to establish true and justified propositions despite having adopted a method of generalized doubt.

Tindal presents a Lockean definition of reason, self-evident truth and the light of nature:

Once a proposition is asserted to be a self-evident truth, there is not much more to say about it.

Given these assumptions, the constraint that time travel must not lead to inconsistent outcomes could be seen merely as a tautology, a self-evident truth that cannot possibly be false, because if you make the assumption that it is false this would lead to a logical paradox.

Lewis additionally said that " unless something is self-evident, nothing can be proved ", which implies for the debate on omnipotence that, as in matter, so in the human understanding of truth: it takes no true insight to destroy a perfectly integrated structure, and the effort to destroy has greater effect than an equal effort to build ; so, a man is thought a fool who assumes its integrity, and thought an abomination who argues for it.

The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period.

A famous claim of the self-evidence of a moral truth is in the United States Declaration of Independence, which states, " We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Since many religious authorities believe in the self-evident truth of their doctrines, a mere exposure to the truth in the book would tend to convert outsiders trying to learn the language.

" Johnson sees this as an issue of " turning away from " self-evident truth, the " sin question " and the need to prepare the way for acceptance of a Creator.

Consequently it is necessary that the point of departure of human reasoning be some immediately knowable, i. e. self-evident, propositions called the first principles, whose truth is not, indeed cannot be grasped through demonstration, but only by intuition ( noûs ).

The Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, is based upon the " self-evident " truth that " all men are ... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ".

Walker's Appeal sought to undermine racist ideology, encourage black self-help through education and religion, exhort readers to take an active role in fighting their oppression, and press white Americans to uphold the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

She argues that all humans are moral beings, and should be judged as such, regardless of their sex: “ Measure her rights and duties by the unerring standard of moral being … and then the truth will be self-evident, that whatever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do.

Their meanings cannot be stated in a true definition, but their meanings can be referred to instead by being placed with their incomplete definitions in self-evident statements, the truth of which can be tested by whether or not it is impossible to think the opposite without a contradiction.

Thus, right desire cannot be defined properly, but a way to refer to its meaning may be found through a self-evident prescriptive truth.

The terms " real good " and " right desire " cannot be defined apart from each other, and thus their definitions would contain some degree of circularity, but the stated self-evident truth indicates a meaning particular to the ideas sought to be understood, and it is ( the moral cognitivist might claim ) impossible to think the opposite without a contradiction.

Lincoln called a self-evident truth " the electric cord ... that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.

" Lincoln said that Chief Justice Roger Taney ( in his Dred Scott decision ) and Stephen Douglas were opposing Thomas Jefferson's self-evident truth, dehumanizing blacks and preparing the public mind to think of them as only property.

Like all axioms, this axiom is considered to be self-evident truth, not to be proven, but used for proof.

More to the point, however, is the putting forward of the notion that just as descriptive statements being considered true are conditioned upon certain self-evident descriptive truths suiting the nature of reality ( such as: it is impossible for the same thing to be and not be at the same time and in the same manner ), a prescriptive truth can suit the nature of the will through the authority of it being based upon self-evident prescriptive truths ( such as: one ought to desire what is really good for one and nothing else ).

Instead of using deduction to derive the truth, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad uses self-evident psychological arguments.

Under the auspices of the Outing Club, Dartmouth also has the Mountaineering Club, which takes on tough climbs like Mount McKinley, and Bait & Bullet, whose interests are self-evident, and even sports a Woodman's Team, which competes with other New England colleges in wood sawing and chopping, canoe races, and the like.

Even if one does not accept this very strong claim, foundationalists have a problem with giving an uncontroversial or principled account of which beliefs are self-evident or indubitable.

Moore argued that once arguments based on the naturalistic fallacy had been discarded, questions of intrinsic goodness could only be settled by appeal to what he ( following Sidgwick ) called " moral intuitions :" self-evident propositions which recommend themselves to moral reflection, but which are not susceptible to either direct proof or disproof ( PE § 45 ).

The work contains almost no arguments as such, but, rather, consists of declarative statements which are meant to be self-evident.

This verification and confirmation ( epimarteresis ) can only be done by means of the " evident reason " ( henargeia ), which means what is self-evident and obvious through our sensory input.

The figures from Cirelli and Ultimate Ungulates are more reliable, although there is a self-evident error for Cirelli's calculation of the upper female range of 40, which is not possible from the figures he provides.

This critique of synthetic a priori knowledge argues that the only truths which are self-evident to reason are statements which are true as a matter of definition, such as the statements of formal logic and mathematics.

Evidence for gender differences in empathy are important for self-report questionnaires of empathy in which it is obvious what was being indexed ( e. g., impact of social desirability and gender stereotypes ) but are smaller or nonexistent for other types of indexes that are less self-evident with regard to their purpose.

Jack and Roepstorff assert, ‘… there is also a sense in which subjects simply cannot be wrong about their own experiential states .’ Presumably they arrived at this conclusion by drawing on the seemingly self-evident quality of their own introspections, and assumed that it must equally apply to others.

These formulæ, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulæ appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself.

This also led him to inquire whether it could be possible to ground synthetic a priori knowledge for a study of metaphysics, because most of the principles of metaphysics from Plato through to Kant's immediate predecessors made assertions about the world or about God or about the soul that were not self-evident but which could not be derived from empirical observation ( B18-24 ).

Scotus held that while our duties to God ( found on the first tablet ) are self-evident, true by definition, and unchangeable even by God, our duties to others ( found on the second tablet ) were arbitrarily willed by God and are within his power to revoke and replace ( which is why God was able to command the murder of Isaac, the spoiling of the Egyptians, and the adulterous marriage of Hosea ).

Schopenhauer is mistaken in thinking that the nature of the will is self-evident (§ 19 ), which is in fact a highly complex instrument of control over those who must obey, not transparent to those who command.

For instance, the stench from decomposition of unburied bodies was such that it could be smelled from the camp, such as at the nearby village of Treblinka, Masovian Voivodeship, which in turn would make it self-evident that unnatural amounts of death were happening nearby, causing concern among locals.

It was in the second, 1799, memoir in which he stated, but did not prove ( claiming it to be self-evident ), the theorem that now bears his name.

Another response is that the laws and moral principles are objective and self-evident in nature.

Henry More, in his Enchiridion ethicum, attempts to enumerate the " noemata moralia "; but, so far from being self-evident, most of his moral axioms are open to serious controversy.

For example, Alexander Hamilton cited the following moral propositions as self-evident in the Federalist No. 37:

Some rationalist ethical intuitionists characterize moral " intuitions " as a species of belief ( for example, Audi, 2005, pp. 33 – 6 ) that are self-evident in that they are justified simply by virtue of one's understanding of the proposition believed.

This is a mistake, Prichard argued, both because it is impossible to derive any statement about what one ought to do from statements not concerning obligation ( even statements about what is good ), and because there is no need to do so since common sense principles of moral obligation are self-evident.

This is a mistake, he argued, both because it is impossible to derive any statement about what one ought to do from statements not concerning obligation ( even statements about what is good ), and because there is no need to do so since common sense principles of moral obligation are self-evident.

Most of Wesley's grounds for criticism are moral: since — as he would consider self-evident — suicide is an evil act that affronts God and causes the doer to go to hell, the glorification of the lady's act in this poem is seriously objectionable.