Anselm's motto, Credo ut intelligam, marks well the distance that has been traversed since Tertullian's Credo quia absurdum est.
As a human person, I am body and soul; and the idealistic identification of the Ego with soul or mind, involving the corollary that my body belongs to the non-Ego and is no part of myself, is the reductio ad absurdum of idealism.
Credo, quia absurdum was applied, notably by the popular writers of the French Second Empire, in a fashion grotesquely literal enough to scandalize Tertullian himself.
Some subtle clues leading to a reductio ad absurdum proof that this scheme is flawed can be found in the original text.
Some subtle clues leading to a reductio ading to a reductio ad absurdum proof that this scheme is flawed can be found in the original text.
Such a position is a reductio ad absurdum of the attempt to transcend the ultimate character of those intuitions and feelings which prompt men to benevolence.
The Treatise is a reductio ad absurdum of the principles of Lockianism, inasmuch as these principles, when consistently applied, leave the structure of experience entirely " loosened " (to use Hume's own expression), or cemented together only by the irrational force of custom.
This dialectic, initiated by Euclides, became more and more opposed to the testimony of experience; in the hands of Eubulides and Alexinus it degenerated into hairsplitting, mainly in the form of the reductio ad absurdum.