Wednesday Wisdom

Thomas Jefferson, the second vice president and third President of the United States was a philosopher, writer, polymath, farmer, politician and a revolutionist. He was a man who aspired towards virtue and enlightenment principles. He was born April 13, 1743, in Shadwell, Virginia, into a family who owned a large plantation. He lost his father at age 14 and inherited approximately 5,000 acres and went on to be educated at the College of William & Mary, graduating in 1762, and trained in law under “Americas First lawyer” and Founding Father George Wythe.

He started his political career by being elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 where he emerged as a powerful voice against British rule of his beloved Virginia. At age 33, Jefferson was chosen by the Continental Congress to draft the Declaration of Independence. Influenced by Enlightenment philosopher John Locke in his “Two Treatise of Government”, Jefferson embraced the ideal of people having natural rights to life, liberty, and property and the government exists by the consent of the governed. He argued that it was a moral imperative for the people to overthrow a government when it becomes tyrannical. He was also highly influenced by Baron de Montesquieu, the French philosopher whose book “The Spirit of the Laws” (De l’Esprit des Lois) gave the framework of a democratic republic where there was separation of powers should be divided into three branches. Each branch should limit the others to avoid concentration of power and that the best safeguard of liberty was a well-structured republic with distributed authority.

The Declaration of Independence

To the British, Jefferson was a rebel, and his Declaration of Independence was seen as a dangerous and illegitimate justification for rebellion, laden with radical Enlightenment ideals and hypocrisy. Jefferson and the Founding Fathers were seen by the British as traitors to the Crown and they put their life and liberty in jeopardy by signing a document declaring independence. British elites and British loyalists criticized the Declaration’s claims of universal rights as hypocritical, especially coming from a slave-owning Virginian like Jefferson. In the colonies and with the critics in London, they called the document overly dramatic, ungrateful, and philosophically radical.

The Declaration of Independence was anything but radical or dramatic, in fact the document was based on logic, reason and ethics written in cold and sober facts. Jefferson wrote the declaration in three parts which consisted of a preamble, a list of grievances and a course of action. The declaration was not a private correspondence to King George and parliament, rather a declaration to the world on why it was not only a course of action but a just one. Using both deductive and inductive reasoning, Jefferson makes the case for American independence in the most logical way. The document is broken up into three sections, the Preamble, the List of grievances and the actual Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson begins with universal principles, borrowed from John Locke, and uses them to justify independence. He states clearly and logically that “All men are created equal and have unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. He states the Governments exist to protect these rights and derive power from the consent of the governed. he goes in “If a government becomes destructive of these ends, the people have the right to alter or abolish it.” Jeferson concludes that “Therefore, the American colonies have the right to separate from Britain”. This is deductive reasoning which is a top-down use of logic and more specifically uses syllogism, which was championed by Greek philosopher Aristotle. Syllogism is a form of reasoning in logic where a conclusion is drawn from two given or assumed propositions (premises). Each premise shares a common term with the conclusion, and the reasoning follows a specific structure.

Jefferson also provides a long list of specific grievances against King George III, meant to show a pattern of tyranny. In this part of the document Jefferson uses inductive reasoning to make his case to justify the revolution. Inductive reasoning is a bottom-up logical structure which cites specific examples such “He (King George) has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, " He has obstructed the administration of justice. He has kept standing armies in peacetime without consent and He has imposed taxes without representation.”

2025 - A warning from ancient Rome

Polybius (c. 200 – c. 118 BCE) was a Greek historian of the Hellenistic period best known for his work The Histories, which covers the rise of the Roman Republic and its domination over the Mediterranean world. After the Roman victory at the Battle of Pydna (168 BCE), Polybius was taken as a political hostage to Rome, where he lived for years among the Roman elite. Although Greek, he admired Roman virtues like discipline, civic duty, and law, and foresaw Rome’s global role and went on to write forty books including his work The Histories, a historical telling of the Hellenistic period which covers the rise of the Roman Republic.

Polybius, in The Histories, emphasized the importance of a balanced government—combining monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—and argued that Rome’s rise brought stability and order to the entire Mediterranean world. Polybius argued that Rome’s conquest brought order, law, and peace (Pax Romana) to a previously unstable Mediterranean world. His theory of the mixed constitution inspired later thinkers like Cicero, Machiavelli, Baron de Montesquieu, and eventually the American Founding Fathers in Jefferson and Madison.

In his book, Polybius’s describes his theory of political evolution called Anacyclosis. He notes a recurring cycle in which governments degenerate from monarchy to tyranny, aristocracy to oligarchy, and democracy to mob rule before restarting the cycle. Montesquieu was influenced by this idea when developing his theory of separation of powers, aiming to stabilize government by balancing the strengths and weaknesses of each form to prevent or slow the process of institutional decay.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the delegates had created; he famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin was aware of how fragile republican systems can be having been a student of history. Just over a century after Polybius praised Rome’s balanced republic, it collapsed under Octavia becoming Augustus, the first Roman emperor.

In 1995 scientist and philosopher Carl Sagan wrote The Demon-Haunted World as both a warning and a guidebook, hoping to empower citizens to think critically and resist the rise of ignorance in an age overflowing with information but lacking wisdom. In his book Sagan cautions “You have to teach the habits of thought. Without it, we drift toward superstition and darkness.”

And now you know...

Thank you, Dad, for the gift of curiosity.

Philosophy is the art of thinking, the building block of progress that shapes critical thinking across economics, ethics, religion, and science.

METAPHYSICS: Literally, the term metaphysics means ‘beyond the physical.’ Typically, this is the branch that most people think of when they picture philosophy. In metaphysics, the goal is to answer the what and how questions in life. Who are we, and what are time and space?

LOGIC: The study of reasoning. Much like metaphysics, understanding logic helps to understand and appreciate how we perceive the rest of our world. More than that, it provides a foundation for which to build and interpret arguments and analyses.

ETHICS: The study of morality, right and wrong, good and evil. Ethics tackles difficult conversations by adding weight to actions and decisions. Politics takes ethics to a larger scale, applying it to a group (or groups) of people. Political philosophers study political governments, laws, justice, authority, rights, liberty, ethics, and much more.

AESTHETICS: What is beautiful? Philosophers try to understand, qualify, and quantify what makes art what it is. Aesthetics also takes a deeper look at the artwork itself, trying to understand the meaning behind it, both art as a whole and art on an individual level. A question an aesthetics philosopher would seek to address is whether or not beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

EPISTEMOLOGY: This is the study and understanding of knowledge. The main question is how do we know? We can question the limitations of logic, how comprehension works, and the ability (or perception) to be certain.