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Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username. Krapf himself had complained of a certain Mr. Cooley who, in his Inner Africa Laid Open of had refused to lend credence to native reports of snow-covered peaks in the region. Here Krapf is echoing some of the themes of the debates held in the Royal Society of London two centuries earlier about the veracity of anecdotal reports.
Strange, unnatural, alien, moonlike, valley-less: Mt. Kilimanjaro confounds the Europeans, imports disorder into their pat scheme of what must go with what. It is also surrounded, as Kretzmann reminds us immediately after his description of East African topology, by people who have no concept of God:. The Paganism or Fetishism which is the native religion of a large part of Africa is a form of Animism or the worship of spirits.
It is a religion of almost unbelievably terrible darkness. It believes in numerous horrible demons, and the Pagan native of Africa thinks of these as surrounding him on every side, continually seeking to do him injury and to bring about his death. These demons are supposed to inhabit every object, whether possessing life or not 5. Of course Krapf and Ravenstein were writing two centuries after Descartes, and we cannot expect the French philosopher to have inferred the existence of Kilimanjaro from slight hints in Ptolemy if that is what they are.
But the Canary Islands had been thoroughly navigated by the 14th century, and several descriptions of the Tenerife peak were available by the time Descartes was reading and writing and defining mountains. Descartes, it has often been noted, was programmatically uninterested in travel reports, in cultural diversity, in the profusion of knowledge about local divergences that might complicate an attempt to model the world as a rational, ordered whole.
He valued geodesy over geography. He had next to nothing to say about the Americas. Descartes by contrast wished to construe philosophy entirely by appeal to notions, which have the advantage of being indifferent to complications that might arrive from the field, from the soiled notebooks of half-literate travellers.
But the significance of this example is brought into sharper relief when it is placed in the light of what really interests him: the existence of God. Descartes would never think to survey the globe, and least of all to survey the people later belittled by Kretzmann as backward animists, to find out whether one must in fact accept the existence of God or not. Sign in. Not registered? Sign up.
Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language. In the readings, always pay close attention to how the author defines "analytic". The most common characterization of an analytic truth is that it is a necessary truth that is true in virtue of meaning or that is true because the concept of the subject is included in the concept of the predicate.
Philosophers who claim there are analytic truths have disagreed about which truths are analytic, though they all agree that definitions are themselves analytically true--for example, the following would be held to be an analytic truth: A brother is a male sibling.
Synthetic Truth. A truth that is not analytic. For example: George W.
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