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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 ...
John C. Calhoun agreed, saying that there was "not a word of truth" in the phrase. [24] In 1853 and in the context of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Senator John Pettit, said that the phrase was not a "self-evident truth" but a "self-evident lie". [24] These men were all either slave owners or supporters of slavery.
A truism is a claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device, and is the opposite of a falsism. [1] In philosophy, a sentence which asserts incomplete truth conditions for a proposition may be regarded as a truism. [2]
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 ...
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."
An "axiom", in classical terminology, referred to a self-evident assumption common to many branches of science. A good example would be the assertion that: When an equal amount is taken from equals, an equal amount results. At the foundation of the various sciences lay certain additional hypotheses that were accepted without proof.
Using these self-evident propositions as his axioms, or foundations, he went on to deduce his entire body of knowledge from them. The foundations are also called a priori truths. His most famous proposition is "Je pense, donc je suis" ( I think, therefore I am , or Cogito ergo sum ), which he indicated in his Discourse on the Method was "the ...
The reasoning process in the field of speculative science presupposes certain fundamental axioms on which all science rests. Such are the principle of contradiction, "a thing cannot be and not be at the same time," and self-evident truths like "the whole is greater than its part". These are the first principles of the speculative intellect.