"Petitio" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be admitted under the name of religion and conscience. Treason and the grossest indecencies not only may be, but have been, called by these names: as among the earlier Anabaptists. 10. And last, it is a 'petitio principii', or begging the question, to take for granted that a state has no power except in case of overt acts. It is its duty to prevent a present evil, as much at least as to punish the perpetrators of it. Besides, preaching ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... largely into a subject so wide and so full of difficulties; but I may remark, that the explanations usually suggested where life takes its rise without apparent generative means, always appear to me to partake much of the fallacy of the petitio principii. When, for instance, lime is laid down upon a piece of waste moss ground, and a crop of white clover for which no seeds were sown is the consequence, the explanation that the seeds have been dormant there for an unknown time, and were stimulated into germination when the lime produced ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... closer to the point before them than any of the classes of the literati;—they began and ended with the word Nose; and had it not been for a petitio principii, which one of the ablest of them ran his head against in the beginning of the combat, the whole controversy ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne |
