文档介绍：DEREK PARFIT
neither God, nor primordial matter, nor energy being supposed to admit of
increase or decrease. The orthodox opinion is that the quantity of reality must
at all costs be conserved, and the waxing and waning of our phenomenal expe-
riences must be treated as surface appearances which leave the deeps untouched.
Nevertheless, within experience, e and go. There are novel-
ties; there are losses. The world seems, on the concrete and proximate level at
least, really to grow. So the question recurs: How do our finite experiences
come into being from moment to moment? By inertia? By perpetual creation?
Do the new e at the call of the old ones? Why do not they all go out
like a candle?
Who can tell off-hand? The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.
All of us are beggars here, and no school can speak disdainfully of another or
give itself superior airs. For all of us alike, Fact forms a datum, gift, or
Vo~gefundenes,which we cannot burrow under, explain or get behind. It makes
itself somehow, and our business is far more with its What than with its Whence
or Why.
Notes
1 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Appendix 17, "On the meta-
physical need of man," abridged.
2 Spinoza, Ethics, part i, prop. xi, scholium.
3 St Anselm, Proslogion, in Anselm's Basic Writings, trs. S. N. Deane, with an introduc-
tion by Charles Harshorne, 2nd edn (LaSalle, 111.: Open Court, 1962);Descartes, Medi-
tations on First Philosophy, in Tbe Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 11, trs. John
Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1984),Third and Fifth Meditations; Immanuel Kant, 7%e Critique of Pure
Reason, trs. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's Press, 1929), pp. 500-7.
4 In more technical language, one may say that fact or being is "contingent," or mat-
ter of "chance," so far as our intellect is concerned. The conditions of its