United States or Luxembourg ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"All that I altogether deny," said Wilson, "but, even if it were true, it would not affect the sociological laws." "I don't say it would. I only say that the sociological laws are as unimportant, if possible, as the law of gravitation." "Which," replied Wilson, "may be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of your view." "Anyhow," I interposed, "we are digressing from our point.

This argument may prove that some reinterpretation of the results of physiology is necessary before they can acquire metaphysical validity. But it does not upset the physiological argument in so far as this constitutes merely a reductio ad absurdum of naïve realism. These various lines of argument prove, I think, that some part of the beliefs of common sense must be abandoned.

When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another that his argument was absurd; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase, "reductio ad absurdum"; the rest badgering him as a conversational bully.

The poet sometimes regards it as a proof of the supersensual nature of his passion that he is, willing to marry another woman. The hero of May Sinclair's novel, The Divine Fire, who is irresistibly impelled to propose to a girl, even while he trembles at the sacrilege of her touching a book belonging to his soul's mistress, is only a reductio ad absurdum of a rather popular theory.

So long as man confines himself to the contemplation of his percipient and reflective self alone so long as he attends only to those modes of consciousness which are produced in him by the impressions of the senses and the operations of thought, he can never hope to escape from the famous reductio ad inscibile of Hume.

If any one denies the conclusion notwithstanding his admission of the premises, he is not involved in any direct and express contradiction until he is compelled to deny some premise; and he can only be forced to do this by a reductio ad absurdum, that is, by another ratiocination: now, if he denies the validity of the reasoning process itself, he can no more be forced to assent to the second syllogism than to the first.

The referendum is of precisely the same nature, but this already has become a reductio ad absurdum, and can hardly survive the discredit into which it has fallen. In any reorganization of government looking towards better results, these elements must disappear.

But in synthesis, reversing the process, we take as already done that which was last arrived at in the analysis, and, by arranging in their natural order as consequences what were before antecedents and successively connecting them one with another, we arrive finally at the construction of that which was sought. The method of reductio ad absurdum is a variety of analysis.

They were forced into the theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary assertions, and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to save it from a reductio ad absurdam.

So I sat silent while the old man took up the thread of the discourse again, and said: "Well, then, property quarrels being no longer possible, what remains in these matters that a court of law could deal with? Fancy a court for enforcing a contract of passion or sentiment! If such a thing were needed as a reductio ad absurdum of the enforcement of contract, such a folly would do that for us."