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Philosophical Autobiography: St Augustine and John Stuart Mill1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

Many classic philosophical debates converge on the twin questions ‘What is man?’ and ‘What is his place in nature?’, in the sense that taking up a position in those debates normally commits one to a certain range of answers to these questions. Such answers typically lie near the centre of one's web of belief, deeply entrenched in the structure of one's concepts, and thus remain remarkably resistant to the standard techniques of confirmation and refutation.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1983

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Footnotes

1

My thanks are due to Dr R. A. Gekoski for many valuable discussions about these matters. The epigraphs are taken from Dilthey, 214, and Wittgenstein, 18e.

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