[the_gastropod]

What's crazy to me is how common this line of thinking was from way back. Thomas Jefferson was borderline obsessed with basically this same concept. There's a really excellent letter from Jefferson to Madison from 1789 describing the importance of usufruct. [1]

My favorite chunk of this thing / the meat of the argument:

> I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

> ...

> For if [a man], during his own life, eat[s] up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, & then the lands would belong to the dead, & not to the living, which would be the reverse of our principle.

[1] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-024...

[saghm]

> I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident

Reminds me of another famous quote from Jefferson. I wonder if describing things as "self-evident" was a personal favorite idiom of his or if it was just a common phrase back then. It seems like a fairly common phrase to me now, but it's hard to know if that's only because Jefferson popularized it.

[terminous]

From Walter Isaacson’s "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life":

On June 21, after he had finished a draft and incorporated some changes from Adams, Jefferson had a copy delivered to Franklin, with a cover note far more polite than editors generally receive today. "Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it," he wrote, "and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?"

Franklin made only a few small changes, but one of them was resounding. Using heavy backslashes, he crossed out the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" and changed it to read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

The concept of "self-evident" truths came less from Jefferson’s favored philosopher, Locke, than from the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. Hume had distinguished between "synthetic" truths that describe matters of fact (such as "London is bigger than Philadelphia" ) and "analytic" truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. ("The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees" or "All bachelors are unmarried." ) When he chose the word "sacred," Jefferson had suggested intentionally or unintentionally that the principle in question the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights was an assertion of religion. By changing it to "self-evident," Franklin made it an assertion of rationality.”

[saghm]

Interesting! I think nowadays, the common way I've heard the latter type of truth described is "axiomatic", but that's probably because it's one of those words that math/CS professors seem to love, and people in tech (like me) might have picked it up from them.