Metaphysical Foundations Research Articles

Research on Boethius’s Views on the Nature of Good and Evil

This inquiry delves into the nuanced perspectives of Boethius on the existence of evil, placing a particular emphasis on its ontological dimensions within the overarching framework of absolute good. The primary focus of this analysis centers around Boethius’s seminal works, The Consolation of Philosophy and Hebdomads which serve as the key repositories of his philosophical reflections. In the former, Boethius conducts a profound exploration of the problem of evil and good, with a specific focus on the ontological realm. The latter work, Hebdomads contributes a metaphysical foundation for a more profound comprehension of these philosophical concepts. This study bifurcates the thematic exploration into two core aspects: the ontological–metaphysical dimension, scrutinizing the concepts of good and bad beyond the realm of human action, and the ethical– moral dimension, acknowledging its importance for a comprehensive understanding of the metaphysical. This dualistic approach enriches the hermeneutic perspective, facilitating a more holistic understanding of Boethius’s intricate thoughts on the nature of good and evil. The synthesis of these levels not only illuminates Boethius’s intellectual journey but also contributes to the broader discourse on the philosophical exploration of ontological dimensions within the context of absolute good.

From Dispositions to Possible Worlds

AbstractDispositions (powers, potentialities) have become popular in metaphysics in recent years, and some of their proponents are advertising them as the best metaphysical grounds for modality. This project has a logical as well as an ontological side: dispositionalists offer modal and counterfactual semantics that make no use of possible worlds. I argue that, as a result of their counterfactual semantics, dispositionalists are in fact committed to entities that play the same theoretical role as possible worlds. Roughly, the claim is that certain counterfactuals (ones that concern 'very large' states) force the dispositionalist to posit world-sized states that play the theoretical role of worlds. As a result, dispositionalists can (and perhaps should) make use of the mainstream framework (Kripke frames and the Lewis–Stalnaker counterfactual semantics) even if they ground all modal facts in dispositions.

Social constructs and how not to ground them

ABSTRACT According to a current trend in social ontology, by articulating claims of social construction in terms of metaphysical grounding, we can shed light on the metaphysics of social construction and understand deep truths about social identities like race and gender. Focusing on two recent accounts, I argue that this move from social construction to grounding has limitations. While there are intelligible grounding claims that can explain certain ideas in social ontology, such grounding claims add nothing to what we have learnt from constructionists about race and gender. Although some applications of this grounding approach attempt to remedy this and offer detailed analyses of how social kinds are grounded, they yield results that are inconsistent with some very plausible views about social construction. Thus, if we want to illuminate the metaphysics of social construction, we must explore other alternatives.

칸트 ‘물 자체’의 해석: 교육학적 관점

In this article, I tried to explore the meanings of ‘Ding an Sich’(thing in itself) in Kant’s epistemology and attempted to interpret its epistemological meanings from educational perspective. It is true that Kant's epistemology is a philosophical discussion and does not contain any significant mentions of education. But his epistemology deals with the nature and limitations of knowledge about experience(or phenomena), and it can be said that his epistemology can make an important contributions in its own way to revealing the nature of knowledge as educational content.
 In Kant's epistemology, ‘thing in itself’ has the various status on the context of discussion, such as ‘transcendental material’, ‘transcendental object’, ‘intelligible object’, and ‘transcendental ideal’. Examining these concepts, we find that ‘thing in itself’ can be said to have the status of the ‘unknown ground’ or ‘metaphysical ground’ of knowledges.
 The ‘thing in itself’ as metaphysical ground, can be distincted from the ‘forms’ of knowledge which are belong to the subject, and it refers to the ‘world in itself’ or ‘the world as noumenon’. It can be said that Kant's epistemology shows the ‘twofold structure’ of the world divided into phenomena and ‘thing in itself’. From the perspective of Education, the ‘thing in itself’ of Kant’s epistemology shows that knowledge as educational content has a metaphysical or transcendental ground.

도덕교육과 행복: 교육윤리학의 관점

Ethics, to be genuinely meaningful, must thoroughly elucidate the intricate relationship between knowledge, virtue, and happiness. Educational ethics represents the perspective that this relationship can be justly addressed within a life dedicated to the pursuit of schola, or in simpler terms, a life devoted to education. An ethics that assumes virtue can be determined independently of, or prior to, the practice of moral education, a so-called philosophical ethics, leaves room for an understanding of the relationship between practice and virtue as a means―end relationship, and further imposes on life and education the covert but insistent demand that the realization of ends requires heroic effort. In philosophical ethics, happiness is a question that is always left unanswered. On the other hand, modern virtue ethics rejects the foundation assumed by philosophical ethics, thereby diminishing the significance of happiness to the level of ease and comfort that can be enjoyed in a life without that foundation. If so, the topic of happiness can be a good starting point for exploring the possibility of a genuine ethics that contrasts with philosophical ethics but does not deny the metaphysical foundation. According to Thomas Aquinas, the acquisition of virtue is not something that can be guaranteed by heroic efforts against nature. The highest virtue lies not in the human determination to ‘regulate’ nature, but in the divine determination to ‘let’ nature be the master. The life of teaching and learning knowledge is a journey into a life where nature is master.

Islamic Civilization and Theological Causes of the Social Underdevelopment: A Traditionalist Reading of Modernist Theses

This paper analyzes the theory of Islam as a religion that could have formed a rationalistic civilization, based on scientific progress, individualism and democracy. One of the representative studies on this topic is the work of Mustafa Akyol Reopening of Muslim Minds, in which the author uses the method of counterfactual analysis, posing the fundamental question: what would Islamic civilization look like if in the Sunni majority had not prevailed Ash’ari theology, but rationalistic, Mu’tazili theology? Although it could be said that the author of this study does not err when he concludes that Ash’ari occasionalism stopped the development of science in Islam, he nevertheless errs when he claims that the doctrines of voluntarism, predestination, and uncreatedness of the Qur’an, were generators of injustice in Islamic society. In this paper we tried to analyze the metaphysical foundations of these doctrines, re-examine the validity of the hypothesis about their harmfulness, and re-examine whether the observed harmful effects come from Islamic tradition or from the more recent attempts of modernization of Islam.

Weak Thought and Religion in Gianni Vattimo: Implications and Repercussions

In this paper, I focus on controversial issues in Gianni Vattimo’s later philosophy concerning religion. In his later writings, Vattimo employs his idea of “weak thought” (il pensiero debole) to (re)interpret Christianity by claiming that as opposed to metanarratives of modernity, a weak ontology not only weakens all foundations and dominant truth claims, but also enfeebles the strong metaphysical claims of atheism such as “God does not exist.” There is no reason to be an atheist, according to Vattimo, since weak thought enables emancipation from all ideological foundations, including atheism. Therefore, Vattimo offers a new definition of secularization: In contrast to modernity’s claim that secularization is to banish religion from the states of reason and progress, he changes the target of secularization from religion to metaphysics. Hence, the rigid distinction between faith and reason is nothing but another foundation that needs to be weakened. That is why the aim of secularization in the West is not separate faith and reason, but to weaken metaphysics in order to make room for faith. Put it differently, secularization is “weak thought” itself. This idea is strengthened by Vattimo’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s announcement of God’s death. However, in Vattiminian perspective, the God announced as dead by Nietzsche is not the God of the biblical text but the God of metaphysics which philosophers have believed since Pascal. Hence, the statement that “God is dead” is basically the rejection of the metaphysical foundation built by modernity this time. Like Jesus the crucified, God in the postmodern time, too, becomes weak and is tolerant toward the other. Furthermore, like the birth of Christianity, the postmodern return of religion, in fact, depends on those who receive this announcement. For postmodernity as a philosophy of event considers the Christian event in the sense of Ereignis. That means Nietzsche never comes to “claim” that God is dead, but rather he makes an announcement of the death of God as a historical event. That is why Vattimo maintains that postmodernity is not only the overcoming of metaphysics but also now the rebirth of Christianity after the second death of God, and proposes two constituents of the postmodern return of religion: (1) the reinterpretation of kénosis as a diminution of all foundations, and (2) the recognition of truth as caritas as opposed to the metaphysical agreement over truth as an obsession with objectivity. Thus, we can conclude that Vattimo in his later writings radicalizes hermeneutics in terms of scrutinizing the idea of “weak thought” with Christianity. However, it also should not be unnoticed that employing his earlier thoughts to (re)interpret Christianity after Nietzsche’s announcement and Heidegger’s ontology, Vattimo risks the major points of his earlier consideration of hermeneutics as koine in the postmodern era. Though he draws a modest picture of the postmodern era, Vattimo falls into the error of reducing hermeneutics as koine to the Christian discourse. On the other hand, Vattimo has an idiosyncratic and outmoded understanding of what it is to be an atheist “in postmodern times”. In this regard, by misapprehending the possible responses of atheistic arguments, Vattimo risks his weak thought (il pensiero debole) by making the religious approach “strong” in comparison not only with other religions and various traditions but also with atheism. Finally, I argue that Vattimo’s rhetoric of “the return” is doomed to constitute a fundamentalist approach regarding the future of Christianity.

RELIGION AND THE STATE: THE FUNCTIONAL PURPOSES AND THE ISSUE OF LEGITIMACY

The present paper examines the importance of the functional criterion employed in assessing the legitimacy of the state in the context of political and Islamic communities. The main, underlying hypothesis is that the existence of the state, as envisaged by Muslims political scholars, is linked to the realization of the legitimate purposes as well as the empowerment of the Ummah’s sacred values and principles. This approach, which is based on the religious criterion of legitimacy presumes that the legitimacy of the state is contingent upon its commitments towards the requirements that were initially established to achieve. Regarding the methodology, this paper combines a historical approach to explore the origins of the state and its connection to religion, alongside content analysis aimed at comprehending the metaphysical foundation underlying the state’s inception. The paper concludes that the state, in its Islamic perspective, is a historical product, wherein text and history intertwine, resulting from the interaction of the political community that rule it with their believed religious metaphysics. This requires the subordination of the state to the Ummah as a functional tool rather than an independent entity.

CORRESPONDENCE OF HEISENBERG’S VIEWS WITH THE MULTIMODULAR CONCEPT OF A.V. AND L.A. BUROV

This article is devoted to a brief analysis of the views of the German physicist in their comparison with the concept of the metaphysical foundations of the universe of modern physicists Alexei Vladimirovich and Lev Alekseevich Burov. The object of the study is the main philosophical work of Heisenberg - the treatise “The Order of Reality” - and the work of the Drillers called “Metaphysical Status of physical Laws”. The metaphysical concepts of the multimodular reality of the mentioned authors are compared, and a brief historical basis for the emergence of these concepts is given. The substantiation of the importance of philosophical research in the field of physics and mathematics, and quantum physics is given - in particular. The necessity of further research of the issue is postulated considering the latest concepts in natural science within the framework of binary geometrophysics of Yu.S. Vladimirov. In conclusion, the importance of the modal (or multimodular) nature of reality is argued for the construction of a new, comprehensive picture of the world, within which it would be possible, finally, to understand the essence of quantum processes that determine reality, and to reach a fundamentally new level of philosophy of natural science.

Танец и религия: онтологические точки пересечения

The article raises questions about how changes in sacred dogmatics affect the development of dance culture. In contrast, is it possible for dance to influence religious ideology? Why for some confessions dance is an inte-gral part, and for others – a sinful act? Consideration of the attitude of religious consciousness to dance in the historical aspect determines the relevance of the topic. The paper attempts to go beyond the understanding of dance as a bodily-physical phenomenon and determine its metaphysical foundations, from the position of which it is possible to talk about the relationship between dance and religion and proto-religion. The author shows not only the historical and cultural points of intersection of dance and religion, but also reveals the onto-logical features of their relationship on the basis of M. Eliade’s method of the history of religions.

No foundations for metaphysical coherentism

AbstractRecently, metaphysical coherentism has been propounded as an alternative to metaphysical foundationalism and infinitism. The view replaces the picture of reality as a hierarchy of levels with that of a network of objects or facts standing in symmetric or, more generally, cyclic relations of metaphysical dependence. This paper defends the orthodox picture of a well-founded hierarchy against the claimed superiority of coherentism. First, it will be argued that alleged theoretical advantages of coherentism do not hold up to scrutiny. Secondly, examples that are claimed to support coherentism are either misdescribed as involving metaphysical interdependence, or foundationalist treatments fare at least as good and often better than coherentist interpretations. Thirdly, a similar diagnosis applies to a recently proposed coherentist interpretation of quantum entanglement. The more general diagnosis is that claims of metaphysical dependence are convincing only if there is a detailed account of how one item metaphysically explains another. While foundationalists can resort to various specific explanatory relations, coherentism seems to be incapable of providing detailed explanations.

Novelistički likovi kao analogija projektivnog života

María Zambrano positions her poetic reasoning based on the coordinates of Ortega’s vital reasoning: she assimilates it at first, without subjecting it to a rigorous critical analysis, and she later distances herself to bring her poetic reasoning closer to more vitalist positions. On this journey of poetic reasoning, until it finds its definitive location, its metaphysical foundation of the analogy of novel characters as a representation of existential ethics is paradigmatic: in Ortega its development is insufficient, but she (more sensitive to literature) is capable of giving the metaphor more depth, with a bolder analysis, thanks to her understanding of the genre of the novel, which owes nothing to the theory of her master’s novel. She accepts Ortega’s premise that we are unfinished. But she takes the conclusions further to mark the terrain of her poetic reasoning, which rebels against the sacrifice of life to the being: Faced with life as a project, she understands, from Benito Pérez Galdós’ character Nina, that what we have to do to finish doing is not pre-determined. She rejects a programmatic life.

Philosophical Underpinnings of Tirumantiram

The current study takes comparative approach to analyze the metaphysical, moral, and mystical aspects of the work known as Tirumantiram written by Tirumular. This paper compares Tirumantiram with various philosophical texts by analysing six key themes of metaphysics, ethics, spirituality, duty, cultural context and linguistic nuances. It exposes inherent commonalities of man’s nature despite cultural differences, allowing for sensitivity regarding universal as well as exceptional conceptual aspects. The study meticulously identifies metaphysical foundations, ethical principles, and spiritual practices, thus enlightening readers on integrated wisdom of world philosophical legacy. Moreover, this exercise adds to scholarly debates and offers practical contributions towards ethical living and spiritual understanding in a pluralistic global village.

Opaque Grounding and Grounding Reductionism

AbstractThis article aims to contribute to the largely neglected issue of whether metaphysical grounding – the relation of one fact’s obtaining in virtue of the obtaining of some other (or others) – can be given a reductive account. I introduce the notion of metaphysically opaque grounding, a form of grounding which constitutes a less metaphysically intimate connection than in standard cases. I then argue that certain important and interesting views in metaphysics are committed to there being cases of opaque grounding and demonstrate that four representative accounts of grounding available in the literature are unable to accommodate such cases. This is argued to constitute a problem for those accounts that is likely to extend to other possible reductive accounts of grounding that employ the popular strategy of explaining grounding in terms of other hyperintensional phenomena. Unless the reductionist is willing to opt for some sophisticated modalist account, the possibility of opaque grounding cases thus provides indirect support for primitivism about grounding, a view that has previously been widely embraced but rarely supported by argument.

Aquinas On Being, Goodness, And Divine Simplicity

AbstractAquinas's virtue-based ethics is grounded in his metaphysics, and in particular in one part of his doctrine of the transcendentals, namely, the relation of being and goodness. This metaphysics supplies for his normative ethics the sort of metaethical foundation that some contemporary virtue-centered ethics have been criticized for lacking, and it grounds an ethical naturalism of considerable philosophical sophistication. In addition, this grounding has a theological implication even more fundamental than its applications to ethics. That is because Aquinas takes God to be essentially and uniquely being itself. Consequently, on Aquinas's view, God is also essentially goodness itself. Aquinas's metaphysical grounding for his ethics is thus meant to be understood in connection with his more fundamental views regarding God's nature, and in particular his views of God's simplicity. This metaphysical grounding confers significant philosophical and theological advantages on his ethics.

Metaphysical foundationalism, heterarchical structure, and Huayan interdependence

Metaphysical foundationalism, heterarchical structure, and Huayan interdependence

A Metaphysical Foundation for Religious Thinking in Public? On Sharing Reason with Afro-protestant Thought

Abstract This article examines metaphysics as a method for religious thinking in public. Such a method invites criticism because 1) no one institution or population group can determine how well others use reason and 2) religious justifications for optimal reason-sharing emanate from privileged institutions. Reason is worth using and sharing when traditions share limit-questions. On what basis had the determination – that some use and share reason better than others – seemed plausible? Some scholars base their determination on appeals to metaphysics. The first part of this article introduces public theology’s origins in American civil religious discourse. The second part examines a foundational method for public reason. These parts establish a relationship between a description of public theology and an examination of its use of reason in David Tracy’s methodological justification of metaphysics. The third part shows how Afro-protestant thought mediates public and emancipatory reason by asking whose inquiry liberates and why.

Precursors and theoretical background of Kant’s philosophy: ontological and metaphysical aspects

The year 2024 will witness the 300th anniversary of Kant, the philosopher, whose works, according to many researchers, began modern philosophy. However, the outstanding achievements of Kant, his “Copernican revolution”, the transcendental method did not appear from scratch. The revolutionary ideas of Kant absorbed the experience of outstanding representatives of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the New Age. The political and socio-cultural situation in Europe in the 18th century also had a certain impact on the formation of his philosophy. Among the outstanding philosophers of the preclassical period, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas should be noted. Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau should be mentioned among the representatives of the New Age. Some of these philosophers influenced his ethical philosophy, which is beyond the scope of this work. It is advisable to consider all the above problems in the context of the coordinate system of the world based on the limiting dynamic equilibria, since Kant raised questions about the boundaries of the sensory sphere, reason, reason, and human freedom. He resolved many of them or outlined approaches to their solution. Kant also claimed to remove the contradictions between empiricism and rationalism – the main epistemological currents of the New Age; however, according to the researchers of his creative heritage, he did not succeed. At the beginning of his philosophical activity, Kant tried to find the ultimate foundations of metaphysics, the value of which Kant constantly emphasizes. He believed that this was necessary in order to elucidate the final foundations of reality. Kant continued the search for ultimate foundations in his “critical philosophy” in aesthetics, analytics, and dialectics. He revealed the boundaries of reason, sense, and free will. He drew the line between the “idea of God” – the “ideal of pure reason” and its actual capabilities.

Nietzschean Nihilism according to Vattimo

Gianni Vattimo is an Italian postmodern and nihilistic philosopher and political activist. He is one of the most influential Italian and Western philosophers in the interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. It was he who brought Nietzsche and Heidegger to the center of philosophical research in Italy in the late 1970s. Vatimo’s continuous dialogue with Nietzsche and the Nietzschean tradition is multifaceted. Of course, this aspect adds other branches to our study of Vatimo’s view of Nietzsche’s nihilism, including Vatimo’s discussion of hermeneutics, truth, and morality. The research also shows that the Nietzsche discussed by Vatimo is closer to an Italian Vatimo than to French or German philosophy. Vatimo’s interpretations of Nietzsche’s nihilism do not open the same philosophical doors as his contemporaries in the West. Because in Vatimo’s interpretations, Nietzsche presents himself as a revolutionary political and social philosopher and produces a new hermeneutics within Nietzsche’s nihilism called hermeneutical nihilism, which is linked to the discussions of modernity and postmodernity. To interpret nihilism according to Italian Nietzsche, we need to interpret the concept of weak thought, which is important to Vattimo. Because Vatimo’s concept of Nietzsche’s nihilism is related to other concepts of nihilism, therefore, in this research we will focus more on the aspect that Nietzsche’s nihilism according to Vatimo is the nihilism that makes Vatimo the Nietzsche of Italy. We have also reached several conclusions in the research, the most important of which is that the research is an attempt to investigate Nietzsche’s nihilism in Vatimo’s philosophy, which has opened the way for Vatimo to criticize Western modernity.Therefore, we ask: What are the metaphysical foundations of modern society that Vatimo rejects? What does the term postmodernism mean in Vatimo’s hermeneutic nihilism? To answer these questions, we will focus on three themes that are meaningful in Vatimo’s thought about Nietzsche’s nihilism: hermeneutics, postmodernism, and weak thought.

Integrated Information is not Causation: Why Integrated Information Theory’s Causal Structures do not Beat Causal Reductionism

In a recent work (Grasso et al., 2021), practitioners of the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) claim to have overcome the weaknesses of causal reductionism in producing a coherent account of causation, as causal reductionism would blatantly conflate causation with prediction and could not answer the question of ‘what caused what.’ In this paper, I reject such a dismissal of causal reductionism since IIT anti-reductionists misunderstand the reductionist stance. The reductionists can still invoke a causal account stemming from the causal power of the universe’s basic units and interactions that, eventually, may lead to structures supporting integrated information. Additionally, I claim that the IIT-inspired misunderstanding of causal reductionism originates from the former’s metaphysical deficit, conflating information with causation. However, as a possible way out, if IIT is complemented with a deeper metaphysical ground, such as nested hylomorphism, an improved argument against causal reductionism can be made to work by invoking formal causality as the ultimate cause of integration in natural systems.