A Philosopher's Ruminations

  The kind of certainty we can have for Descartes depends on clarity and distinctness of perception, which is a criterion of truth that Descartes extracts in the Third Meditation based on the cogito argument made in the Second Meditation (Descartes, 1985, Vol. 1). In his Principles of Philosophy (Descartes, 1985, p.207) Descartes explains that by clarity he understands what is present to the attentive gaze of the mind and by distinctness what separates the content of the mind from everything else. In the cogito argument we immediately perceive the necessary connection between thinking and existence, it is not possible for me to think and not exist. Further certainty may be distinguished into subjective certainty and objective certainty. The cogito argument gives us only subjective certainty because from it we can infer that we are thinking and that we are constrained to think in a certain way as a matter of psychological necessity but it does not allow us to answer scepticism about...

  Orwell’s reasoning goes like this: by becoming continuous war ceases to exist. War is the opposite of peace and hence is regarded as an aberration but if war becomes normal then the contrast between peace and war would be obliterated. But in what sense can war become normal? It would happen when external pressures would cease to exist. Orwell says: “Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life—the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like…..Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low leve...