"The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason" is Schopenhauer's doctoral thesis.

The English translation read: Cartwright & Erdmann

Refer to the Chinese translation: it should be the version of the Commercial Press, and be revised after verification.

Words in italics are my personal annotations and have no basis in the text.

I don’t quite understand this paragraph. Many things are based on guesswork. Please give me some advice.

Schopenhauer proposed a distinction that has been ignored for a long time: cognitive grounds and causes, and thereby criticized the ontology of Spinoza and Descartes, and discussed the relationship between Leibniz and Kant. on the expression and classification of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and discussed the need to prove the general Principle of Sufficient Reason in his paper.

Descartes

Descartes believed that God exists because the concept of God includes existence (at least Schopenhauer thinks this is what Descartes argued, and I agree with this) a little). But the inclusion of existence in the concept of God does not prove that God does exist - otherwise, anyone can make up a concept "horned beast") or is implicitly included in other concepts (such as "omnicorn", omnipotence includes the concept of existence) - this fictional X that I invented can immediately obtain existence.

The problem with Descartes is that he did not distinguish between cognitive grounds and cause. The concept of God includes existence, so the concept of existence is the cognitive basis of the concept of God, a component of the concept of God, and is “included” in the concept of God, one of the grounds of the concept of God. And the cause of God is something else, which should lead to the existence of God. Descartes should have identified causes rather than cognitive grounds, but if he did regard a certain part of God himself as the cause of God's existence, this would be illogical.

The cognitive basis is cognitive and conceptual; the reason is physical and objective. If we trace the cognitive basis, the results can only be limited to the cognitive basis and concepts; if we trace the causes, we can get something other than concepts.

Spinoza

Next is a discussion of Spinoza. I am not familiar with Spinoza, so I skipped it.

Leibniz

Leibniz was the first person to formally express the principle of sufficient reason as a fundamental law of cognition and science, but in addition He made little progress. He occasionally hints at a distinction between the principle of sufficient reason for cognition and the principle of sufficient reason for causation, but neither states it nor develops it.

Wolff

Wolff first distinguished two kinds of the law of sufficient reason: "reason" as cognitive basis and cause. But he didn't fully make use of this distinction either.

I think Wolff's definition of "principal (the "law" in "the law of sufficient reason")" is very good: the so-called principle is contained in it (itself) Reasons for something else.

He also introduced the three reasons (reasons) proposed by Wolfe: 1) Reasons for occurrence: reasons for the reality of things, such as the reason why the stone becomes hot when the sun shines on it; 2) Reason for existence: the reason for the possibility of things, for example, the heat capacity of stones is the reason for the existence of hot stones; 3) Reason for cognition: as mentioned above.

Schopenhauer believes that the second reason is actually the first reason. I didn't understand his argument.

Hume

Hume was the first to begin to doubt the law of sufficient reason, especially the law of causality. He concluded that everything we see is nothing more than a series of accidents. Schopenhauer believed that Hume's error was obvious (but he did not explain why), and Hume's main contribution was to provoke Kant's thinking.

Kant

Schopenhauer believed that Kant’s transcendental epistemology proved that we can make innate determinations of things (such as time, space, categories, etc.), so things cannot be independent of our knowledge. And there is - at least that's what he seems to say. I personally don't agree with this.

Kant’s contribution to the Principle of Sufficient Reason lies in his proposing the distinction between cognitive grounds and physical reasons. Kant's expressions are much clearer than Schopenhauer's (this is really unheard of, Kant's works can actually be called "clear" sometimes, and this is compared with Schopenhauer...): Cognitive basis ( The formal principle of cognition, the law of sufficient reason for cognition) is that "every proposition has a basis (reason) (in German, basis and reason are the same word: Grund)"; physical reasons (the transcendental principle of cognition, The transcendental principle of sufficient reason) is "everything has its cause (basis)".

People of the Kantian school inherited the understanding of this distinction and reflected it in their logic tutorials. For example, Kiesewetter classifies cognitive causes as logical and physical causes as metaphysical. Schopenhauer thought this statement was very good. Kant's opponents also accept this distinction.

Schopenhauer then continued to give some examples, but they were not explained in detail and will not be repeated here.

Proof of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

We have said before that the meaning of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is multiple, so so far, when we talk about the Principle of Sufficient Reason, we may be It refers to a certain kind of law of sufficient reason (such as the cognitive law of sufficient reason), or it may refer to the general (vague) law of sufficient reason.

Regarding the general proof of the principle of sufficient reason, he believed that previous proofs were invalid. Wolff's proofs in "Ontology" and Baumgarten's "Metaphysics" are "word games", while Plato's proofs in "Aphorism" and Jakob's "Logic and Metaphysics" are circular arguments. The exception is Kant's proof (I did not find it in the pure batch), because his proof is to prove the a priori nature of the law of causality, which he will discuss later. I don't understand the above proofs. If readers have time, please feel free to enlighten me.

? After rebuking these people’s proofs, he gave his own reasons for not proving the general principle of sufficient reason:

1. The general principle of sufficient reason is a vague , vague, containing multiple meanings. So it is unprovable because the form in which it was expressed was wrong from the beginning. Here Schopenhauer quoted a sentence from Aristotle, which I think is very wonderful and I would like to share it with you:

2. When we want to prove a proposition, we always return to its premises. (its cognitive basis), and so in the end we arrive at a cognitive principle or set of cognitive principles. "True" propositions are nothing but consistent with these cognitive principles (empiricism may have another way of saying: truth is consistent with experience. So that true propositions recognized by one of the doctrines can be recognized by the other at the same time, It can be said to be one of the main tasks of German classical epistemology). However, the principle of sufficient reason is already a cognitive principle. It does not have a proposition as a premise, so we cannot prove it. However, this principle can also be said to be "true", and the nature of this "truth" will be discussed later.

3. When we want to prove a proposition (Schopenhauer uses "expressed judgment" here, I don't know the difference), we just want to demonstrate the recognition of that proposition. Know the basics. This means that we have to presuppose that the proposition is true. So we are stuck in a circular argument.

I disagree with the third point. Does showing a cognitive basis mean presupposing that this proposition is true? It seems that he didn't understand the difference between truth (existence) and truth (logic)?