Axiom
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- A self-evident and necessary truth; a proposition which it is necessary to take for granted; a proposition whose truth is so evident that no reasoning or demonstration can make it plainer. For example, "The whole is greater than a part."
- The Romantic movement held that not all truth could be deduced from axioms, that there were inescapable realities in the world which could only be reached through emotion, feeling and intuition.
- An unproved theorem that serves as a basis for deduction of other theorems. E.g., "A point has no mass; a line has no width. A plane is a flat surface with no mass and contains an infinity of points and lines".
- An established principle in some art or science that is universally received.
- The axioms of political economy cannot be considered absolute truths.
See also
Door James Robert Goetsch gepubliceerd 1995 Yale University Press
In this book James Goetsch argues that Vico's major work, the New Science, is a sustained, controlled poetic-philosophical meditation on the human world and that it is a philosophy in its own right. According to Goetsch, Vico proposes that we abandon the alliance between logic and metaphysics and instead form one between logic and the rhetorical and poetical conceptions of human understanding that inform the human community. In the way Vico revives the ancient sense of rhetoric found in Aristotle, who stated that logic and rhetoric are counterparts. Vico's philosophical system is best exemplified by the 114 axioms at the base of his New Science. These axioms, which range over a puzzling variety of subjects, do not follow a logical or geometric model in the conventional sense, making it hard to account for Vico's claim that he thinks in the "geometric manner". Goetsch asserts, however, that they are used by Vico to express what Aristotle called maxims - "thoughts worth thinking" - which establish the fundamental points necessary to speak about human realities. Once this becomes clear, we see that Vico's thought combines history, philosophy, and poetry in a comprehensive manner and gives us a new geometry of the human world.
