COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

Counterexamples to this are of two kinds:

Tautological things that are not self-evident, and self-evident things that are not tautological. The former can easily be found: Just pick a tautology that is exeedingly complicated and whose proof is long. Many mathematical theorems will serve.

The other kind of counterexample is more interesting. "Existence exists" is one. The law of excluded middle is another. The existence of one's own consciousness is yet another. These are self-evident non-tautologies.

Where do they come from? At the risk of being repetitious, I think an interesting account of this can be found in Peikoff's paper "Aristotle's Intuitive Induction" in the 1985 volume of The New Scholasticism.

-- Michael Hardy, assistant professor, UNCP (posted 5/4, 5:30 p.m., E.D.T.)

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