Benjamin Franklin Quotes:
Ocupation: Founding Father of the United States
Life: January 17, 1706 - April 17, 1790
Birthday: January 17
Death: April 17
"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Leibniz. In what became known as "Hume's Fork" the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition.
topic: Empiricism, Determinism, Assertion, Synthetic, Hume
