On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature: Two Essays (revised edition) — Schopenhauer — John Shaqi
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature: Two Essays (revised edition)
Schopenhauer · en
But, even in a narrower sense, thinking does not consist in the bare
presence of abstract conceptions in our consciousness, but rather
in connecting or separating two or more of these conceptions under
sundry restrictions and modifications which Logic indicates in the
Theory of Judgments. A relation of this sort between conceptions
distinctly thought and expressed we call a _judgment_. Now, with
reference to these judgments, the Principle of Sufficient Reason here
once more holds good, yet in a widely different form from that which
has been explained in the preceding chapter; for here it appears as
the Principle of Sufficient Reason of Knowing, _principium rationis
sufficientis cognoscendi_. As such, it asserts that if a _judgment_ is
to express _knowledge_ of any kind, it must have a sufficient reason:
in virtue of which quality it then receives the predicate _true_.
Thus _truth_ is the reference of a judgment to something different
from itself, called its reason or ground, which reason, as we shall
presently see, itself admits of a considerable variety of kinds. As,
however, this reason is invariably a something upon which the judgment
rests, the German term for it, viz., _Grund_, is not ill chosen. In
Latin, and in all languages of Latin origin, the word by which a reason
of knowledge is designated, is the same as that used for the faculty
of Reason (_ratiocinatio_): both are called _ratio_, _la ragione_,
_la razon_, _la raison_, _the reason_. From this it is evident, that
attaining knowledge of the reasons of judgments had been recognised as
Reason's highest function, its business κατ' ἐξοχήν. Now, these grounds
upon which a judgment may rest, may be divided into _four_ different
kinds, and the truth obtained by that judgment will correspondingly
differ. They are stated in the following paragraph.
§ 30. _Logical Truth._