One rotten apple destroys the whole basket!

One rotten apple destroys the whole basket!
by Iqbal Latif
03-Nov-2011
 

Anyone who wants to establish stable knowledge must start with a new slate and relinquish all intrinsic prejudices. For me freedom from my code of belief and erasure of my pre-conceived innate mind set has been the biggest challenge of my life.

I am grateful to Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Hume and Frege, Husserl who helped me expedite to exercise

this option of starting with a clean slate. All great minds wanted philosophical knowledge to be an untouchable structure built on an impregnable base.


To reject the inherited dogma and accept the true knowledge we need to free ourselves from all narrow-mindedness and then look at everything with a judicious eye.

Here Descartes' foundationalism comes handy when he highlights the example of a basket full of apples, and being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading.


Would we not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast our eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those we see to be sound, leaving the others?

We the seekers of truth have to defy logic by building a ship in an open sea without the dry docking facility. The tools in our hands to achieve this task are paper/mind and writing/experience.

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