Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Moral Moments

The Rationalist Dream Come True

by Joel Marks

Ever since Euclid axiomatized geometry, the dream of philosophy has been to derive all of nature from a set of self-evident truths. From the start the project was dubitable: after all, geometry is about airy abstractions, while nature is made of dirt. You could take any starting point ideas you please and derive a whole world from them, but that world is likely to be fantasy. The peculiar thing about geometry, though, was that it did seem to have some purchase on reality. It is not only in the mind of a mathematician that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, but also on a piece of paper.

…