Summary Of Robert Fogelin's Walking The Tightrope Of Reason

I find myself a very logical and controlled person in a world of very non-logical and non-controlled people. So Robert Fogelin book Walking The Tightrope of Reason seems to go back and forth in, but in the same respect as the world seems to shaw back and forth. Fogelin will almost begins to play devil's advocate in the fight for reason. In this book Fogelin will state the law of noncontradiction and then will present obstacles and question on how to dispel or how to accept it. In this I will focus on Fogelin’s theme of sufficient reason. It is a powerful and disputed philosophical principle guaranteeing that everything must have a reason or a cause.

In the law of noncontradiction this becomes a classic case of logic. Meaning that that contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time, e.g. the two

Descarte will state that God is an example of absolute perfection, and because we have knowledge of absolute perfection, perfection must exist.Since we have knowledge of what perfection is. God as perfection therefore God must exist. Immanuel Kant’s basic response was this is nonsense, his ultimate goal was to confound all great illusions of metaphysics. This is a was a creation of an intellectual illusions. Which was the basic problem with sufficient reason was the creation of illusions instead of actual knowledge. Forgelin says that the creation of illusions and the infinite regress in sufficient reason to deal with these two problems. “the inherent inconsistency of the systems of rules that govern our thought, and the tendency for thought to turn dialectical-we, must find some way of constraining the conceptual by nonconceptual.” Forgelin basically says that Kant failed to answer his own questions and he feels that he will fail himself and his answer to these questions would be skepticism. Reverting to questioning