Outstanding Performance by ACS Students at National School Philosophy Competition

Darina Parvanova, 10th grade

The one who is mistaken is not the one who does not know, but the one who pretends to know.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Age of Enlightenment is established in history as a standard of supreme conviction in knowledge and the ultimate necessity of its centralization in the concentricity of the individual, society and the understanding of being. In its role as a foundational work for this period, Kant's essay "What is Enlightenment?" convincingly rejects the so-called "immaturity" as a viable approach to a full and conscious existence and appeals to its displacement by a rational, reflexive and deeply conscious turning point - a transition to "adulthood". It is Kant who proposes an end to the seemingly intractable dispute between rationalism and empiricism as leading paradigms in the field of epistemology. His, at the time revolutionary, division of human knowledge into categories leads to a kind of dialectical reconciliation of the key epistemological contradiction and provides the foundations for the definitive Enlightenment fallacy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau expresses a surprisingly good summary of this fallacy in the treatise “Emile, or on Education” with the words: “The one who is mistaken is not the one who does not know, but the one who pretends to know.” In other words, the Enlightenment arrogance about correctness in thinking and the supremacy of knowledge is reduced to the simple formulation that оnе falls into the deepest delusion when he turns his own methods of knowledge into an absolute criterion for truth.

In order to develop this argument, it is appropriate to base it on the promising beginning of this philosophical problem. In the beginning of the 17th century, a radical reform entered the intellectual tradition – that of rationalism, with René Descartes being its official founder. The elevation of reason as a sublime agent of knowledge opened the philosophical space for a radically different set of reasonings in the branch of epistemology, which Descartes himself supplemented with the principles of methodological skepticism and innate ideas as the nodes of his philosophy. In contradiction to rationalism, the school of empiricism arose, placing sensory experience at the center of human knowledge. The idea of ​​the human being as a tabula rasa transformed knowledge from an absolute a priori into a derivative of a flow of impressions of material existence. Here, the main paradox of empiricism appears. Empirical experience, as gradually accumulated, is fragmentary, transient, scattered in separate sensations that do not in themselves provide meaning or causality. Within the empiricist tradition (еspeciаlly in Locke), even what is perceived as “knowledge” is not simply a passive reflection of the being, but the result of an active rationalization of sense perception. The so-called complex ideas are not a given, we are not furnished with them immediately from experience; these ideas are reasonable constructions that can be thought in several basic directions. Some of them refer to the modes of perception (space, time, quantity, motion), which in themselves already imply measurement, comparison and a degree of abstraction. Others are associated with the concept of substance, which is not directly given in experience, but is thought of as the content of the qualities, through which we generally perceive things as stable objects. In addition, the relations between ideas are emphasized, when reason connects separate perceptions in a way that inevitably points to the other. In this sense, in the empiricist perspective, an inevitable dissonance arises in the notion of experience as "pure": it is always mediated by the activity of reason, which organizes, structures and transforms it into knowledge, to the extent that the knowledge acquired "through experience" is degraded to a purely rational one, while experience itself remains simply a chaotic, uncategorized presence.

On this path we arrive at a circumstance of reason becoming a last instance, through which every claim to knowledge or truth inevitably passes. Rationalism arises from reason, and empiricism becomes dependent on it in the pursuit of coherent knowledge. In this borderline position stands the aforementioned Enlightenment fallacy – not the conviction that reason is a necessity, but that it is ultimately self-sufficient. A moment is reached in which reason remains the sole arbiter of truth, and the question arises: “What is the criterion by which reason itself proves its own veracity?” Ultimately, if the reason uses reason to prove reason, then the argument turns out to be circular and reason defines itself through itself. This circular composition is not simply a logical inaccuracy, but is a structural problem of the entire Enlightenment epistemology.

If all knowledge must be justified by a rational criterion, and the criterion itself also belongs to the same reason, then the existence of an external support of knowledge is eliminated. When reason becomes both the basis and the verification mechanism of its own truth, it ceases to be able to go outside of itself to guarantee credibility, and at the same time has no other source of guarantee. In this way, its internal dependence on the very act of thinking that reason tries to justify is outlined. Finally, the Enlightenment reaches its own limit when reason is cardinally charged with the role of method of knowledge, criterion of truth, and object of its own doubt.

In the historical-philosophical development of epistemology, the central and inexhaustible question remains that of the source and limits of knowledge. In this chain of thought, knowledge is often thought of primarily as a goal, not a result – it is identified with the striving for a final and uncontradictory truth. But it is precisely when such a striving is brought to its logical limit that the problem of its validity arises (the possibility that knowledge itself may turn out to be dependent on the conditions that give rise to it). In this context, Socrates' "I know that I know nothing" appears to be the most poorly formulated and logically controversial philosophical truth, simultaneously with the erosion of a centuries-old philosophical tradition. Long before Rousseau, Socrates was the first to express the fallacy of the "knower" and probably the mirage of philosophy, as "loving wisdom", for having achieved essential knowledge.

Eventually, all knowledge remains limited by the conditions of its possibility and never reaches the position of absolutely self-sufficient certainty. In this sense, the philosophical tradition is not subject to denial, but to redirection from the pursuit of ultimate truth to reflection on the very conditions under which we speak of truth at all, and knowledge ceases to be possession and becomes an endless awareness of its own limits.

Aleksandra Tsanova, 9th grade

"Men willingly believe what they wish."

François Voltaire

"Men willingly believe what they wish." At first glance, Voltaire's statement appears to express a banal observation, one we might pass over as self-evident. But beneath the pragmatic surface lies a radical rethinking of what perception is and what its relationship to desire might be. Following the Enlightenment dualism between reason and will, Voltaire describes the cognitive process of constructing reality, aiming to separate what we know from what we wish to know - even though such a separation is impossible, since the very faculty of reason that would carry it out is equally biased.

Voltaire conceives reason as a naturally reliable instrument for interpreting the empirical world. At the foundation of his theory, lies knowledge gained through the analytical elaboration of propositional beliefs that exist independently of the subject. There comes a moment, however, when passion displaces reason, and the propositional belief yields to the conative one. The individual then deviates from the "natural order of cognition" and, bypassing the analytical process as the only direct access to the world, and arrives immediately at unfounded conclusions subordinated to primary desires. Paradoxically, the faculty of reason produces its own complete opposite - superstition. The question remains, however, whether reason itself, which Voltaire places in a privileged, neutral position, withstands the same bias.

Conative beliefs inevitably lead to dogmatism. Since the idea reached, through unjustified faith in what is desired is inherently irrational, it sustains itself through the systematic exclusion of anything that might destabilize it. The subject, fusing identity with desires, renders their belief absolute. Voltaire describes this akrasia in Candide, where the optimist philosopher Pangloss declares: "It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end" (Voltaire, Candide, Ch. I). Pangloss grounds his claim to knowledge of the metaphysical order of the world in his insatiable desire for the world to possess a definite meaning and order. Since desire serves as sufficient warrant for his every belief, when the chaos of the world challenges his assertion, Pangloss does not revise his belief in light of reality, instead he reinterprets reality so as to confirm the belief.

Voltaire concludes that optimism is a philosophical chimera, a product of the rupture between discursive reason and the empirical world. In his discourse, the philosopher sharply criticised optimism and religious fanaticism of ecclesiastical institutions, linking them to his broader rejection of metaphysics. For him, the distinction between optimism and metaphysics is merely apparent, because both represent the subordination of reason to will - which renders them equally incompatible with empirical knowledge. But if reason is the natural arbiter of knowledge, the question arises of how such a subordination is possible in the first place.

The primary reason is that the desire for explanation overwhelms judgment. In the absence of knowledge, the primary rational impulse satisfies itself with an illusion that answers its own needs. A further reason is that superstition is actively produced by institutions suppressing reason in order to pursue their own aims of propagating mass belief. In both cases, superstition is a systemic outcome, which raises the question of whether reason can ever free itself from it.

"Can there exist a people free from all superstitious prejudices?" (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 299). Voltaire establishes that prejudice is an opinion formed prior to and separate from judgment, and that judgment, therefore, has the power to overcome it. When the subject becomes aware of the discrepancies between objective reality and their own cognitive distortion of it, they submit their perception to critical reassessment. In formulating this kind of skepticism, Voltaire repudiates the rationalist skepticism of Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz. He attacks the elevation of the skeptical process in itself as a final and complete philosophical terminus. Voltaire's persistent efforts to employ critical reason as a solvent of "superstitions", and of the authority they establish, subject the philosophical authority of the rationalists to the same critique. Here we see how his defense of skepticism functions as an instrument of perpetual epistemic clearing and continuous dismantling of dogmatism wherever it takes root, including within rationalism itself.

Skepticism presupposes that reason can purify itself - yet it is possible that reason itself is a product of the Enlightenment's desire for absolute objectivity. Although Voltaire's claim that "men believe what they passionately wish" points to a genuine cognitive phenomenon, the solution he proposes - pure empiricism - fundamentally suffers from the very problem it attempts to resolve. Desire cannot be volitionally excised from perception, for it is an active constitutive element of reality. Voltaire's critique of implicit faith in rational thought is equally valid against his own thesis. People believe what they passionately wish - not, as Voltaire concludes, because their desires override their judgment, but because judgment itself is always already biased.

Bibliography:

Voltaire. Philosophical Dictionary. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org/files/18569/18569-h/18569-h.htm . Accessed 8 May 2026.

Voltaire, François. Candide. Translated by Boyan Atanasov. Moята Библиотека, chitanka.info/text/5505-kandid . Accessed 8 May 2026.