To find them, mathematicians from the ancient Greeks on have set up systems consisting of three basic elements: axioms, true statements so intuitively obvious they are self-evident; rules of inference, logical principles indicating how to use axioms to prove new, less obviously true statements; and those new true statements, called theorems.
One of Aristotle's ideas that particularly influenced Thomas was that knowledge is not innate but is gained from the reports of the senses and from logical inference from self-evident truths.
Thus, for instance, after these nineteenth-century developments, philosophers who dream of a completely certain knowledge of right and wrong secured by logical inference from self-evident principles can no longer propose Euclidean geometry as an instance in which a similar goal has proved attainable.
As data sets characterizing genes grow in size and complexity, it seems self-evident that computation can assist in inference as to gene function.
(Thomas, however, in distinction from Aristotle, added divinely revealed propositions to self-evident truths in forming his basis for inference).
By this he meant that the access was not based on inference or argument, but was self-evident (though we could still get it wrong, just as we can with sense-perception).
It is self-evident just as a mathematic axiom, or the validity of a form of inference, is evident' (RG 29; also 12, 32; KT 42).
The rest is self-evident.
When was it self-evident?
This might seem self-evident.
The costs seem self-evident.
