Kind Of Metaphysics Research Articles

The Quinean Roots of Lewis’s Humeanism

INTRODUCTION: QUINE AND HIS STUDENT LEWIS FROM A HISTORICAL POINT OF VIEWMetaphysical enquiry into the existence and nature of things, pronounced dead midcentury by logical positivists, late Wittgensteinians, ordinary-language philosophers, and pragmatists, took centre stage again at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Champions of metaphysics consider its victory complete, holding up David Lewis (1941-2001) as their hero. His pluriverse of possible worlds, they say, made metaphysics respectable once again. But antimetaphysicians, inspired by W.V. Quine's (1908-2000) pragmatist scruples about heavy-duty metaphysics, proclaim with equal confidence that metaphysics has no legitimacy. All of this is peculiar when we consider the two philosophers' personal and intellectual history. Quine was Lewis's teacher, and there was much common ground between them. Both were empiricists, physicalists, Humeans, lovers of ontological desert landscapes who made efforts to explain away or reduce abstruse posits naturalistically.Increased historical awareness of twentieth-century developments would reveal the true import of Quine's and Lewis's work, and so help overcome such pervasive misunderstandings between metaphysicians and antimetaphysicians. To bring about a historically self-aware metaphysics we must extend the boundaries of the history of analytic philosophy to include the mid-to-late twentieth century. Analytic philosophy's early beginnings, its revolutionary overthrow of idealism and bold investigation of how language maps onto an external world, have been subjected to close historical scrutiny. Now, in the twenty-first century, we can investigate its development between 1945 and 2000 with the benefit of hindsight, too. But an even more compelling reason to develop this new subfield, the recent history of analytic philosophy, is because we twenty-first-century philosophers need it to remove misconceptions about our intellectual heritage. Quine in particular is a sadly misunderstood figure, despite his stature. His intellectual relationship with his unabashedly metaphysical disciple Lewis is an especially illustrative case in point. My overarching project is to set the record straight about Quine's role in metaphysics' rumoured demise, and its improbable rise from its ashes, between the mid- and late twentieth century. I argue, was not an antimetaphysician or flat-footed deflationist, but an interesting, empiricist metaphysician, striving to fit metaphysics around scientific discovery (Janssen-Lauret 2015; Janssen-Lauret 2016; MacBride and Janssen-Lauret 2015.) In the service of that larger project, this paper teases out one strain of unacknowledged Quinean influence on Lewis: his Humeanism.First I will briefly rehearse the case that Quine always was a metaphysician. Quine's views developed over time, but a preference for a modest, empirically-based kind of metaphysics is a constant presence throughout his early, middle, and late periods. His empiricism and pragmatism led him to deny the legitimacy of Aristotelian and a priori metaphysics. These he viewed as ontologically extravagant, indefensible additions to the frugal physicalism he favoured. Still, to embrace a frugal, physicalist ontology is to endorse a metaphysical point of view. Secondly, I will present historical evidence, based on a combination of published works and never-before-seen unpublished papers and correspondence, which suggests that Lewis's Humean metaphysics derives, not from his reading Hume, but most likely from Quine. Thirdly, I will show that Lewis's mature, Humean counterpart theory, too, has thoroughly Quinean underpinnings.W.V. QUINE: EMPIRICIST METAPHYSICIAN Antimetaphysical pragmatists and inferentialists denounce metaphysical discourse as empty. It derives, they say, from mistaking merely useful or conventional features of our discourse for profound truth about reality. Some prominent antimetaphysicians of this stripe claim Quine as one of their own: Quine, too, is really a deflationist about ontological issues (Price 2009, 325). …

Bayle and Panpsychism

Abstract:Pierre Bayle shows that, in order to avoid devastating objections, materialism should postulate that the property of thinking does not emerge from certain material combinations but is by nature present everywhere in matter – a hypothesis recently revived and labelled “panpsychism.” There are reasons for entertaining the idea that Bayle actually considers this enhanced materialism to be sound, as it might use the same line of defence that Bayle outlined for Stratonism. However, this would lead to a view similar to Locke’s superaddition theory, and I contend that such cannot be Bayle’s position because he embraces the Cartesian principle that each substance has only one principal attribute. As a consequence, for Bayle any system that conjoins thought with matter in the same simple substance is untenable. By contrast, this makes clear which kinds of metaphysics and epistemology modern panpsychists need to adopt in order to defend their view.

New work for a theory of ground

There has been much recent interest in a distinctively metaphysical kind of determinative explanation: ground. This paper concerns various skeptical challenges to ground’s relevance to metaphysics, such as that it is an empty posit, that the work it is supposed to do is appropriated by other notions, and that it is inapt for specific issues it should serve. I argue against these challenges. My strategy is both critical and constructive. Critical because I argue that versions of these challenges raised by Elizabeth Barnes, Kathrin Koslicki, Mari Mikkola, and Jessica Wilson are not persuasive. Constructive because we may nevertheless learn from them new work for ground.

Feng Youlan’s Interpretation of Western Philosophy:A Critical Examination from the Perspective of Metaphysical Methodology

The paper aims to display a limited observation of Feng’s interpretation of Western philosophy through the window of metaphysical methodology. This paper concentrates on Feng’s interpretation of Western philosophy from the perspective of metaphysical methodology and aims to display a limited observation of Feng’s interpretation of Western philosophy through the window of metaphysical methodology. Based on a brief review the recent studies of Feng Youlan and Western philosophy, this paper analyzes the progress and insufficient aspects in current studies on this issue and particularly clarifies what are the metaphysics and metaphysical methods in the context of Feng Youlan’s philosophy. In clarifying Feng’s interpretation of Western philosophy from the perspective of methodology, this paper further critically analyzes the Feng’s positive metaphysical methods and negative metaphysical methods, and assumes that Feng’s negative metaphysical methods essentially is a kind of attitudes towards metaphysics but neither a kind of metaphysics nor a kind of metaphysical methods. Instead of characterizing metaphysical methods as positive and negative as Feng did, this paper suggests an alternative division of metaphysical methods: direct and indirect methods of dealing with metaphysical issues.

Religions and Psychotherapies—Special Issue

The birth of modern psychotherapies—along with the birth of psychology as a science on one side and with psychoanalysis, other depth-psychological treatments and behavioral therapies in addition to medical treatments of psychological disorders on the other side—in the 19th and 20th centuries was accompanied by positivistic and mechanistic paradigms underlying empirical research and claims of scientific dignity [1]. Affirmations which could not be tested or observed empirically had to be excluded from science—including any kind of metaphysics and religious belief, notwithstanding pioneering studies by William James [2], Granville Stanley Hall, James Henry Leuba and Edwin Diller Starbuck [3] for psychology in general and for psychology of religion(s) in particular. In particular, the critique of religions by Sigmund Freud has continuously exerted a strong impact in the fields of psychiatry and psychotherapies; in addition, regarding psychodynamics and symptoms of psychic disorders, religious phenomena in the lives of patients may be just as affected as other cognitive and emotional aspects and behaviors [4]. Consequently, religious experience and religious behavior of patients in psychiatry and psychotherapies have rarely been object of research and teaching apart from predominantly symptomatic and pathogenic perspectives [5].

Regularities, Natural Patterns and Laws of Nature

The goal of this paper is to sketch an empiricist metaphysics of laws of nature. The key idea is that there are regularities without regularity-enforcers. Differently put, there are natural laws without law-makers of a distinct metaphysical kind. This sketch will rely on the concept of a natural pattern and more significantly on the existence of a network of natural patterns in nature. The relation between a regularity and a pattern will be analysed in terms of mereology. Here is the road map. In section 2, I will briefly discuss the relation between empiricism and metaphysics, aiming to show that an empiricist metaphysics is possible. In section 3, I will offer arguments against stronger metaphysical views of laws. Then, in section 4 I will motivate nomic objectivism. In section 5, I will address the question 'what is a regularity?' and will develop a novel answer to it, based on the notion of a natural pattern. In section 6, I will raise the question: 'what is a law of nature?', the answer to which will be: a law of nature is a regularity that is characterised by the unity of a natural pattern.

Forme di vita e relazione educativa

The aim of this paper is to show that the main object of pedagogical research is relationship among people who share the same context. The analysis follows a linguistic approach, from a theoretical and metaphysical kind of language to a language of forms of life. After the linguistic turn, particularly in Ludwig Wittgenstein, forsaking a Platonic language means throwing language in forms of life, and blending it with people and their lives. So an educational process has to leave the unique, traditional pattern to open itself to different voices of life.

There are Intentionalia of Which it is True that Such Objects Do Not Exist

According to Crane’s schematicity thesis (ST) about intentional objects, intentionalia have no particular metaphysical nature qua thought-of entities; moreover, the real metaphysical nature of intentionalia is various, insofar as it is settled independently of the fact that intentionalia are targets of one’s thought. As I will point out, ST has the ontological consequence that the intentionalia that really belong to the general inventory of what there is, the overall domain, are those that fall under a good metaphysical kind, i.e., a kind such that its members figure (for independent reasons) in such an inventory. Negatively put, if there are no things of a certain metaphysical kind, thoughts about things of that kind are not really committed to such things. Pace Crane, however, this does not mean that the intentionalia that are really there are only those that exist. For existence, qua first-order property, is no metaphysical kind. Thus, there may really be intentionalia that do not exist, provided that they belong to good metaphysical kinds.

La metafísica de la existencia humana de Gabriel Marcel

In this article, I hold that Gabriel Marcel proposes a kind of metaphysics of human existence that arises from a phenomenology. In order to show this hypothesis, I start from the description that the author does of the situation of contemporary man. Marcel affirms that human being has been reduced to a mere assembly of functions, without leaving any room to mystery. Starting from this account, I develop the concept of ontological need, concept that allows us to go from phenomenology to metaphysis, because the concept of ontological need, according to Marcel, is not only the expression of a subjective need of finding sense, but the expression of the ontological mystery in which we find ourselves. The philosophy of mystery of Marcel, backbone of his metaphysics of the human existence, is explained in the second part of this article, by giving an account of the basic fact of being an incarnated being and by discussing the problem of participation.

Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction

As Barry Stroud sees it, the journey from engagement to metaphysical dissatisfaction has four stages.1 First, we embark on the project of acquiring some especially metaphysical insight into how the world is with respect to some region of our thought about it – say evaluative, or modal or causal thought. The insight that we seek is especially metaphysical when we aspire to go beyond the insight that we gain about the world when we make warranted and true judgements that are the characteristic of that specific way of thought itself. Thus, no especially metaphysical insight is delivered by realizing that it is better to let the guilty go free than to punish the innocent, or that there could not be a true contradiction or that consumption of alcohol alters the mood. What metaphysicians are after, rather, are insights along the lines that there is (or there is not) something evaluative, or something modal or some causal connexion in the world itself and independently of us. Secondly, a special threat to the feasibility of this distinctively metaphysical project arises wherever a specific region of our thought has the special combination of features of irreducibility (of a certain kind) and indispensability (of a certain kind). Thirdly, that threat emerges in the first instance from the attempt to sustain the metaphysical position that many would characterize as anti-realistic (although Stroud does not use that term). The problem is that a certain aporia is implicit in such an attempt to combine the thought that the world is a certain way – with respect to value, modality or causation – (as we must, in line with indispensability) with the further thought that it is not ‘really’ that way. To be clear, the suggestion is not that the conjunction of these thoughts is inconsistent. Nor is it the case that any consideration at our disposal makes it the case, and far less does any show it to be the case, that the relevant metaphysical thesis is false. The predicament is of the theorist rather than of the theory. It has the character of a Moorean quasi-inconsistency, as were we to attempt to claim, ‘It is not the case that P, but I believe that P’ (137), or as intimated by Stroud’s epigrammatic quotation of Wittgenstein, ‘If there were a verb meaning, “to believe falsely”, it would not have a meaningful first person present indicative’. The anti-realist position about value, causation or modality is not properly assertible by anyone who is also engaged in the intellectual practice of thinking about things in evaluative or causal or modal terms. Fourthly, the predicament of the would-be anti-realist does not confer victory, by default or otherwise, on her realist opponent. As with the anti-realist position, and even after the limitations of the anti-realist position have been demonstrated, no available consideration makes it the case, and far less does any show it to be the case, that the contrasting realist thesis is true. As with the anti-realist position, we have a metaphysical claim that has a truth-condition, and one that for all we know is satisfied, but which is never legitimately available to us to assert. And so, at the end of our journey, we find that no thesis of the especially metaphysical kind that we sought to establish at the outset is available to us (in a significant range of cases) to assert legitimately.

Li (Ritual/Rite) and Tian (Heaven/Nature) in the Xunzi: Does Confucian li need metaphysics?

Ritual (li) is central to Confucian ethics and political philosophy. Robert Neville believes that Chinese Philosophy has an important role to play in our times by bringing ritual theory to the analysis of global moral and political issues. In a recent work, Neville maintains that ritual ‘needs a contemporary metaphysical expression if its importance is to be seen.’ This paper examines Neville's claim through a detailed study of the ‘ethics of ritual’ in one of the early Confucian texts, the Xunzi. This text has sometimes been read as offering a form of naturalism in its discussions of ‘heaven (tian)’ as analogous to Western, even modern, concept of ‘nature,’ while other interpreters insist that tian is a normative notion. Does this concept of tian offer a metaphysical ground for ethics of ritual advocated in the text? If so, what kind of metaphysics is it? Does Confucian ritual ethics need any metaphysical grounding? There is no specific metaphysical theory in the Xunzi and passages which could be referring to or implying metaphysical assumptions are open to hermeneutical debates. Even if metaphysical assumptions are necessary or beneficial to an ethics of ritual, the paper argues that the ‘metaphysical flexibility’ of the text could work to its advantage in remaining relevant in contemporary context. The conclusion explores some possible directions for further exploring the metaphysics of ritual in a modern understanding of Xunzi.

Fra Hamann til Fasc. 209.10. Om Grundtvigs forhold til Johann Georg Hamann og dennes samtidige

Fra Hamann til Fasc. 209.10. Om Grundtvigs forhold til Johann Georg Hamann og dennes samtidige[From Hamann to Fascicle 209.10. On Grundtvig's relation to Johann Georg Hamann and his contemporaries]By Bent ChristensenThe German critic and Enlightenment philosopher Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88) can be seen as a German forerunner of Grundtvig who according to a few places in his Verdenskrøniken (World Chronicle), 1817, has known about his writings and perhaps felt a spiritual kinship to him. By all accounts, the only other mention of him at all by Grundtvig occurs in a brief and somewhat enigmatic manuscript entitled “Synchronismer” (synchronisms) (The Grundtvig Archive, Fascicle 209 nr 10). It lists names of 24 German authors supplied with dates marking periods in their careers between the years 1741 and 1781 and has been regarded as a preliminary study for the World Chronicle 1817. But it can also be seen as a view of these authors from a specific “synchronistic” angle, resulting in a particular profile of these 40 years. The list also reflects Grundtvig’s detailed knowledge of German literary history.After a presentation of Hamann, Grundtvig’s evaluation of him in the World Chronicle of 1817 is quoted and commented upon, followed by a an examination of the manuscript list author by author, inclusive of references to treatments in the World Chronicle.The list begins with “Rabener 1741-57” and finishes with “Bürger 1769- 78”; the latest year brought up, however, is “1781” (under the names of Kant and Hamann). In his World Chronicle, Grundtvig states that the period he wants to depict, covers the reign of the Prussian king Frederick the Great (1740-86). The list corresponds almost exactly to this ambition. Hamann’s first year, 1759, is the year in which Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten appeared, his first work addressing a general public. Hamann’s last year, 1781, indicates that he at that time started to write a critical review of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, having read the proofs of it, as a personal friend of the philosopher, before its publication that same year. At first, however, Hamann did not print his text but only communicated it to Herder in a personal letter. The Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft was finished in 1784 but not published until 1800. When Kant in his work asks for a foundation of cognition prior to and independent of experience, Hamann accuses him of aiming at constituting a new kind of metaphysics. Two later works published by Hamann (1784 and 1786) are of a retrospective and summary nature.Concerning the other authors listed, the “first year” in most cases presents the very first step in their literary careers, and the “last year” marks the ending of their initial period. This applies, for example, to Rabener’s “last year”, 1757, when his satires had started already to appear in book form. In Lessing’s case, 1761 is the year in which he accepted a position as secretary for the governor of Breslau. Wieland was appointed town clerk in Biberach in 1760, but in the World Chronicle Grundtvig emphasizes the importance of his Shakespeare translations which did not begin to appear until 1762, though it is likely that Wieland had been encouraged to take up this project as early as 1759. Herder’s “last year” is 1767, the date of publication featured on the title page of Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur—a date often considered to be the prime year of the “Sturm und Drang” (“Storm and Stress”) movement. Goethe’s “last year” is 1774 due to the publication of his best-seller novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers.In several cases the often paired dates of Grundtvig’s list differ from those found in ordinary histories of literature as well as in the World Chronicle of 1817. A closer study of them—and a study of Grundtvig as compared to Hamann—might cause important contributions to Grundtvig research and to the study of German intellectual and literary history.

Sebald, Wittgenstein, and the Ethics of Memory

What does W.G. Sebald mean by the doubling of his character Jacques Austerlitz with Ludwig Wittgenstein, a “poetic” philosopher who, although of Jewish ancestry, had little to say about the fate of the Jews during the Nazi period? Sebald's initiation of the reader into Austerlitz's life story through visual and verbal references to the philosopher suggests certain Wittgensteinian themes and problems. These include the relation of ethics to aesthetics and of both to memory, of propositions to truth-making, and of the verbal to the visual arts as exemplified by the eighty-one photographs included in Austerlitz. Indeed, Austerlitz and Wittgenstein mirror each other in so many ways that a reader familiar with Ray Monk's biography of the philosopher and Wittgenstein's own work might suspect that Sebald lifted specific elements from these texts into his own. But Sebald's work also conveys an unvoiced critique of Wittgenstein's neglect of Nazi politics. If Sebald's representations of the way that both propositions and images can dissimulate, that logic and science can fail and even destroy us, would have interested Wittgenstein, Austerlitz also reminds us that the ethics of memory requires the necessity not of the silence Wittgenstein invokes at the end of the Tractatus in a statement that Sebald himself quotes at the end of Vertigo, but of an ongoing journeying into new literary genres.In Sebald's work each of these relations bears upon the difficulties of representing the Holocaust and Austerlitz mediates the search for his history through photographs of landscapes and buildings. This mediation also occurs through Sebald's dialogue with Wittgenstein's skepticism and, indeed,Through its focus on architectural “monumentality,” Austerlitz brings into full articulation Sebald's “inhabitations” (Mikhail Bakhtin's word) by Wittgenstein's family resemblance, as well as his notion that ethics is a kind of metaphysics.

Vice, Disorder, Conduct, and Culpability

Vice, Disorder, Conduct, and Culpability Stephen J. Morse (bio) Keywords vice, conduct, culpability, mental disorder Dr. John sadler’s interesting paper raises an important issue. It defines vice as criminal, wrongful or immoral behavior. He claims that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) “confounds the concepts of vice and mental illness” and that this confounding has “important implications . . . for the relationship between crime, criminality, wrongful conduct, and mental illness.” The paper correctly notes that disorders for which vice is the primary criterion tend to be impoverished diagnostically and are probably less valid than non–vice-related disorders. Dr. Sadler wonders if the subjects of his case studies are “involved in sick behavior, immoral behavior, both, neither, or some other metaphysical kind altogether.” This is an excellent question that this comment will seek to clarify. It will also consider the moral and legal implications of the answer. The domain of immoral, wrongful, and criminal behavior is essentially action. Some moral and religious traditions evaluate the content of an agent’s thoughts, desires, and character, but the dominant view is that vice primarily describes action that is wrongful because it violates the rights of others or it is wrong in itself. The rules of morality and law create value, but their essential task is to guide the action of agents who must live together. Dr. Sadler does not explicitly recognize that the diagnostic criteria that are vice are all actions, and not simply abnormal perceptions, desires, thoughts, or moods. His three case studies of conduct disorder, factitious disorder, and paraphilia confirm this point. Even pedophilia, which can be diagnosed simply on the basis of urges or fantasies that cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty, would not be considered a vice unless the agent acted on these sexual urges. Those individual actions that meet Dr. Sadler’s criteria for vice I will term “vice actions.” Actions, including vice actions, may be evaluated medically and morally. There is no logical or conceptual reason why the same action cannot be both a sign of mental disorder and wrongful and potentially blameworthy. Actions can be just mad, just bad, or mad and bad. Also, the same action may sometimes be a sign of disorder and sometimes not. No general argument suggesting the contrary is provided. Consequently, there is no confound between the concepts of vice and mental disorder unless vice actions fail to satisfy the generic criteria for being a sign of mental disorder. Dr. Sadler seems to implicitly recognize [End Page 47] this when he asks whether vice–mental disorder relationship criteria are impoverished because there is a lack of consensus about “the minimum requirements for an acceptable set of descriptive criteria for a mental disorder category,” or when he asks “where criminal syndromes . . . fit into a classification of mental disorders.” No consensual, generic definition of mental disorder exists, and deciding whether actions should be signs of mental disorder is particularly fraught because cultural context and values always play a role in the definition of mental disorder. The other potential signs and symptoms of mental disorder are virtually all phenomena that simply happen to people and are not products of agency. Actions are by definition the product of agency, however, and vice actions affect by definition the rights and interests of others. The latter is true whether or not the agent is “vicious.” Even if an agent who has done wrong is excused, the rights of the victim have been violated. Moral, political, and legal evaluation is largely beside the point for non-action signs and symptoms, but it is always on point for vice actions. This is the primary potential source of the confound between vice and disorder. To claim that a vice action is a sign of disorder because it is vice begs the question and is indeed a confound. Even the presence of a biological marker will not save this claim. All human action presumably has biological markers and one cannot say that a marker is of a disorder without first having an independent definition of disorder that the vice action satisfies. Until a robust theory of mental disorder is provided, we cannot determine whether a vice action is...

Hegel's Confrontation with the Sciences in ‘Observing Reason’: Notes for a Discussion

According to a well-known statement in Hegel's Encyclopaedia, what differentiates the philosophy of nature from physics is ‘the kind of metaphysics used by them both’ (W9: §246Z: 20, N: 11). In the same vein, recent scholarship has stressed that Hegel criticises the logical procedures and metaphysical presuppositions of the working scientist's activity, taking issue with their lack of awareness about the mental categories they use and the alleged consistency of their way of arguing. Put rather more critically, it is often claimed that Hegel's concerns were purely philosophical, and that he never entered into genuinely scientific debate. Unlike Schelling, who engaged in scientific debate, Hegel is thought to have confined himself to observing and judging it, demonstrating his ability to grasp its main features, on the basis of which later to build his philosophy of nature.To combat the old tradition of negative assessment of Hegel's relation to the empirical sciences, which saw it as aprioristic, dogmatic, misleading and ill-informed, the editors of the critical edition of the Phenomenology retrace some of the contemporary scientific sources for Hegel's objections to description and classification in the natural sciences, and document his appreciation of new developments in electricity and chemistry. Through a primarily historical approach, Hegel's critical remarks on the attempt to fix laws for organic forces (sensibility, irritability, reproduction) and his critique of the scientific status of physiognomy and phrenology, all of which elucidate his allusions in ‘Observing Reason’, are shown to be rooted in contemporary scientific debates. Recendy, however, it has been contended that this kind of scholarship that identifies Hegel's active engagement with the science of his time, ‘tend[s] to reduce the text to a document for historians of nineteenth-century science’ (Stone 2005: xv). In Italy, a scholar has also made a subtle case for his claim that, in contrast to his mature system, Hegel's confrontation with the natural sciences in the Phenomenology is essentially and necessarily critical, aiming to reveal the partiality, one-sidedness, and inadequacy of forms of cognitive approach typical of the natural sciences, and that it forms part of Hegel's dissolution of all of consciousness's forms of externality.

A Situated or a Jvdetaphysical Body?

A common feature of much recent work done in a variety of disciplines is the foregrounding of embodiment. Thinking in terms of a situated body however, brings up a complex problem which has often been overlooked: the re-importation of a kind of metaphysics of the body or a covert idealism, which stubbornly persists in many such discussions. This is seen in treatments ofthe body as a mediation or as a site for inscription of socio-cultural codings. We will briefly show how even such an influential account ofritualization practices, that of Catherine Bell, shows traces of these problems. The corrective strategy to such conceptions is a properly situational ontology as suggested by Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy and Tim Ingolds critical work on environments.

Fécondité et limites de la réception du platonisme en Angleterre au XVIIe siècle: le cas des platoniciens de Cambridge

Even if in seventeenth-century England empiricism was the main current of thought, Platonism also played a significant part. In the thirties, elaborating at least partly upon the Florentine revival of the quattrocento, Thomas Jackson challenged the Aristotelian views still prevailing at Oxford. Outside academic circles, Lord Herbert of Cherbury was also a vocal critic of scholasticism and somehow prepared the way for the acceptance of the Cartesian doctrine by English thinkers. However, Platonism mostly flourished at Cambridge among a group of men who, after discarding the Calvinist principles on which they had been nurtured, developed a rational theology relying heavily on Platonist or Plotinian ideas. By the mid-century, Benjamin Whichcote bore the brunt of the Calvinist assault, as his former tutor, Antony Tuckney, reproached him for deviating from the orthodox path. The philosophers of the group were Ralph Cudworth and Henry More who endeavoured to find in Platonism an adequate answer to Hobbesian determinism and materialism. Capitalizing upon the Platonist and neo- Platonist texts, which they were thoroughly familiar with, they developed a kind of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics which, in their view, harmoniously combined the best of the Platonic tradition with basic Christian tenets.

Reembracing Metaphysics

The following thought piece addresses the issue ‘what next’ by considering the effects of poststructural thought on the field. Specifically, I argue that poststructuralism has emerged in the field as a problem that a number of geographers have endeavoured to solve by devising new theoretical frameworks and innovative methodological principles, the purpose of which is to make social science ‘better’. In response I suggest that the problems posed by poststructuralism are fundamentally unanswerable and that they are meant to be recognised rather than resolved. While poststructuralism effectively reveals the limits of social science, it should not seduce us into thinking we can somehow do social science differently. This is because social science always involves doing some kind of metaphysics–that is, the practice of determining, delimiting, representing, and explaining how the world works. The goal of this paper is to discuss the relationship between metaphysics and deconstruction as an ontological condition that cannot be surmounted through study or thought. I conclude by suggesting that the goal of social science should not be to get around this relationship but rather to embrace it as a fundamental aspect of what we as geographers, social scientists, and human beings do.

Foundationalism and the Metaphysics of Practical Reasons

This paper argues that much contemporary thought about reasons is saddled with a questionable assumption. The assumption is that reasons owe their normative force to their metaphysical nature; or in other words, that practical is a metaphysical kind. This assumption is traced to an implicit foundationalism in views of reasons, which is itself a response to the threat of a form of skepticism: some reason must be able to stop a regress of reasons, on pain of there being no reasons for action at all. However, foundationalism about reasons, with its implicit commitment to reasons as a metaphysical kind, is not the only way to halt the skeptical threat. A contextualist alternative is sketched and some reasons are offered to prefer it. Much ink has been spilled in the last thirty years or so debating the nature and source of our reasons to act—our reasons. A slow revolt against once-hegemonic instrumental theories has sparked new creativity among Humeans, Kantians, Aristotelians, and others. Virtually all of these views, however, share a common assumption, or perhaps better, a common picture of the form an answer must take. In this picture, our reasons to act are grounded in some kind of thing, which by its very nature provides us those reasons. More specifically, it is commonly assumed that there is some metaphysical kind appropriately labeled pract ical reasons—the debate, then, is a battle over which kind this is, and what its properties are. Do our reasons spring from contingent, subjective desire, or from the Form of the Good? Are they found in normatively loaded value, or ordinary natural fact? Is the source of our reasons subjective or objective? Agent-relative or agentneutral? Necessary or contingent? On this picture, thought begins with metaphysics. Auslegung, Vol. 27, No. 1

Two-Dimensional and Natural Kind Terms

Kripke and Putnam have convinced most philosophers that we cannot do metaphysics of nature by analysing the senses of natural kind terms –; simply because natural kind terms do not have senses. Neo-descriptivists, especially Frank Jackson and David Chalmers, believe that this view is mistaken. Merging classical descriptivism with a Kaplan-inspired two-dimensional framework, neo-descriptivists devise a semantics for natural kind terms that assigns natural kind terms so-called `primary intensions'. Since primary intensions are senses by other names, Jackson and Chalmers conclude that we can and should do metaphysics of nature by analysing the natural kind concepts competent speakers possess. I argue that neo-descriptivism does not provide a suitable basis for doing this kind of metaphysics. I first of all give a detailed account of the neo-descriptivist semantics and deflate the intuitive support neo-descriptivists try to draw from their case of the XYZ-world. I then present three arguments –; the Argument from Ignorance, the Argument from Conceptual Analysis, and the Argument from Laziness. Taken together, these arguments undermine the neo-descriptivist analysis of natural kind terms. I conclude that natural kind terms do not have senses, that we cannot do metaphysics of nature by analysing the senses of our kind terms, and that the Kripke-Putnam account still provides the best semantics for natural kind terms we have.