Philosophy should proceed as logic does, axiomatically starting from clear concepts and evident principles.
Thus every demonstration requires that one first identify "the evident principles that it requires.
Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church, considered them to be the "primary precepts of justice and all law, and natural reason gives immediate assent to them as being plainly evident principles".
"Barring a true flood of tens or hundreds of thousands of cases," she wrote, "no evident principle exists to support the court taking workload concerns into account when engaging in interpretation of the law".
But if President Obama endorses the self-evident principles, he will see change.
Science was knowledge that was deduced from self-evident principles, and theology received its principles from God, the source of all principles.
Still, these people seem certain that the description, whatever it turns out to be, will not be like the great unifying descriptions in physics, in which a single equation, or a few equations, derived from what appear to be almost self-evident principles, can describe and predict vast realms of phenomena.
And, like Aquinas, Maritain accepted the classical foundationalist position that these beliefs could be established by rational deduction from self-evident principles and constituted genuine knowledge.
Ross denied that we can ever know what we ought to do, and rejected the view that there could be strictly universal, self-evident principles specifying what we ought to do.
What is needed in addition, says Rosmini, is a 'system of truth', that is, a system which shows clearly how the passage is made from the most general, self-evident principles to more particular levels of knowledge.
Brink (1988) has argued that it is absurd to claim that two self-evident principles are inconsistent, but Shaver (1999) has replied that Sidgwick is for the most part consistent in calling the principles at issue only "apparently" self-evident, though Shaver also suggests that Sidgwick did not present a compelling case for the egoistic side of the conflict.
