Member-only story
The Only Questions
The Only Questions You Will Ever Need —
— And The Questions You Should Always Ask
A Series on Reasoning
The Ten Commandments of Reason — Part I
by Jane Tawel
October 2019
I need to begin this series with brief bullet points on what I might call, “The Ten Commandments of Reasoning”. In a nutshell… (don’t you love that simile? I wish I could hand you these ideas, tucked into little, hardy, lovely, glossy, hollowed out walnut shells. Alas…)…what I want to explore are what might be called “Big Idea” Questions.
These questions will be based on the following philosophical truths, or “Big Ideas”. These belong to the subcategory of Truths of Reasonable Humanness. If you disagree with the following statements, then it will probably make no sense to read later on about “The Only Questions You Will Ever Need, and The Questions You Should Always Ask”. So, here we go.
Ten Truths to accept as working premises before getting to the Questions, are:
1. Actions have consequences.
2. Some consequences are worse than others.
3. Once you reach “the age of reason”, you are mostly responsible for your actions and more often than…
