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Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. [1] It is associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, religion, science, language, mathematics, and art, and is normally considered to be a distinguishing ability possessed by humans.
In the most general terms, a reason is a consideration in an argument which justifies or explains an action, a belief, an attitude, or a fact. [1] Normative reasons are what people appeal to when making arguments about what people should do or believe. For example, that a doctor's patient is grimacing is a reason to believe the patient is in pain.
The modern [1] formulation of the principle is usually ascribed to early Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Leibniz.Leibniz formulated it, but was not an originator. [2] The idea was conceived of and utilized by various philosophers who preceded him, including Anaximander, [3] Parmenides, Archimedes, [4] Plato and Aristotle, [5] Cicero, [5] Avicenna, [6] Thomas Aquinas, and Spinoza. [7]
He shows how the chance observations of a few results of the form 4 = 2 + 2, 6 = 3 + 3, 8 = 3 + 5, 10 = 3 + 7, etc., may prompt a sharp mind to formulate the conjecture that every even number greater than 4 can be represented as the sum of two odd prime numbers. This is the well known Goldbach's conjecture. The first problem in the first ...
In logic, the logical form of a statement is a precisely-specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambiguous logical interpretation with respect to a formal system.
Logical reasoning is a form of thinking that is concerned with arriving at a conclusion in a rigorous way. [1] This happens in the form of inferences by transforming the information present in a set of premises to reach a conclusion.
Logic and rationality have each been taken as fundamental concepts in philosophy. They are not the same thing. Philosophical rationalism in its most extreme form is the doctrine that knowledge can ultimately be founded on pure reason, while logicism is the doctrine that mathematical concepts, among others, are reducible to pure logic.
Rationalism has a philosophical history dating from antiquity.The analytical nature of much of philosophical enquiry, the awareness of apparently a priori domains of knowledge such as mathematics, combined with the emphasis of obtaining knowledge through the use of rational faculties (commonly rejecting, for example, direct revelation) have made rationalist themes very prevalent in the history ...