Conceptual Idealism and Reformed Metaphysical Method

Abstract

In an article published in 1991, Nicholas Rescher wrote:Idealism, broadly speaking, is doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated. However, specifically conceptual idealism. stands in contrast to an ontological doctrine to effect that somehow constitutes or produces world's matter. Instead, it maintains that an adequate descriptive characterization of physical (material) reality must make implicit reference to mental operations-that some commerce with mental characteristics and operations is involved in explanatory exposition of what is at issue the real world.'Rescher conceives human reason as already shaped by inherited stances, assumptions, values, and received knowledge, at varying levels of attributed significance. In this context, notes theologian Paul D. Murray, for Rescher the rational thing to do is to take one's situatedness seriously whilst continually opening it out to testing against what else there is and what else comes to light. Consequently, Murray concludes,Truth is something that we can legitimately assume ourselves to be articulating in part but which inevitably eludes us in toto and towards which, therefore, we need to understand ourselves as being orientated in mode of aspiration rather than possession, or arrival.. Reseller's thinking. evinces a commitment to acknowledging pluralist reality of world of difference in which we exist and need to negotiate this appropriately.3The fact that Rescher formulates and defends a form of idealism, in tradition of Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, Royce, McTaggart3 brings him closer to a rich British idealist tradition, which is arguably most quintessentially represented by R. G. Collingwood. This framework of conceptual idealism outlined by Rescher some thirty years after Collingwood accommodates very well latter's previous dismissal of commonsense realism and his placing of Kantian transcendentalism and Hegelian immanentism under auspices of Christian concept of God.The definition Collingwood gave to (nai ve, or crude) realism-in his unpublished text Realism and Idealism-reads: [For realist,] object makes no difference to knowing, so that knowing. is a single absolutely. undifferentiated activity and is based on realist's assumption that reality consists in two radically self-contained worlds: objective world of things known and subjective world of cognitive activity,4 whereas for Collingwood itself is a compositum of cognitive activities and their object. Commonsense realism's assumption that things exist of our or mind is criticized by conceptual idealist thinkers-whose voices find an unifying echo in Collingwood's analyses-for its failure to realize that real condition for such a claim is thought itself, so that things considered as existing outside our or are in fact included in it once we think of them as being external to our thought. Similarly, things which are claimed to exist independently of thought cannot otherwise be asserted as existent but by an act of thought.5 As a reputed commentator of Collingwood noted, Oxford don saw every act of consciousness as a creative act of mind, in which exercises some degree of choice and has some goal in view. fiAs an inheritor of a powerful British idealist tradition, Collingwood was accompanied in twentieth century by important fellow thinkers such as Henry Jones, Clement Charles Julian Webb, Alfred Ernest Taylor, and Michael Foster. At present, writes Stephen Toulmin,Collingwood's philosophical arguments speak to us more directly and forcefully than they did to his Oxford contemporaries. The realist positions put forward by John Cook Wilson at Oxford, Ernst Mach in Vienna, and G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. turned philosophical clock back before Kant, and revived earlier traditions of British empiricism. …