America is founded on the self-evident principle that our statesmen are confused, misguided, and wrong.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the right to suicide a "clear and self-evident principle".
This view, as stated by Rosmini, depends upon what he sees as a self-evident principle that cannot be denied by any sane person.
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.
These first, self-evident principles are related to the conclusions of science as axioms are related to theorems: the axioms both necessitate and explain the truths that constitute a science.
It should be added that what rationalists have held about innate ideas is not that some ideas are full-fledged at birth but only that the grasp of certain connections and self-evident principles, when it comes, is due to inborn powers of insight rather than to learning by experience.
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.
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.
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.
