Second Best Known Philosophical Sentence?
I was reading David Lodge's Thinks... (Viking, 2001. Capsule Review: not a comedy of academic manners, but a serious consideration of questions of morality and existence set in one of his amusingly dysfunctional university settings. Compelling, though some of the later plot choices seemed more convenient than convincing.) and came across a passage that was like a little pop quiz (stream of consciousness style and ellipsis in original):
I think therefore I am true enough in that sense . . . Must be the best-known sentence in the history of philosophy. What's the second best I wonder? (p. 4)My first thought was one of my personal favorites, Ockham's Razor: The successful proof with the smallest number of necessary postulates is preferable. But when you say Ockham's Razor, most people think of Sherlock Holmes':"When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth" (Which isn't actually the same thing). At best, they think"the simplest explanation is most likely to be true."
In field of ethical/moral philosophy, of course, some version of the Golden Rule certainly is in the running. Pascal's Wager is another one.
Fifty-five pages later Lodge provides his answer (again in stream-of-consciousness style):
is that perhaps the second best known sentence in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche's 'God is dead' . . .? (p. 59)I thought they were an interesting juxtaposition: Descarte's statement equating independent existence with thought was the first step in his proof that the world, including God, exists; Nietzsche, of course, argued that the existence of the thinking human proved that God does not, in fact, order the universe in a meaningful manner.
Of course, that's all mainstream Western philosophy. The Confucian version of the Golden Rule is pretty widely cited
Tzu Kung asked:"Is there any one word that can serve as a principle for the conduct of life?" Confucius said:"Perhaps the word 'reciprocity': Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you." [XV:23]as is the Great Learning (the core of which is all Confucianism in two paragraphs), though my single favorite line of Confucius remains
"Learning without thinking is labor lost; thinking without learning is perilous" [II:15]Pontius Pilate's"What is truth?" has got to be on any philosophical top ten list.
In the spirit of the opening of convention season, what's your nomination?