Metaphysical Notion Research Articles

Klaus Hemmerle on the Trinitarian Ontology of the Human Person

The 20th-century quest for a Trinitarian ontology was associated with a critical reconsideration of the modern philosophy of the subject. However, this reconsideration did not reject the question of subjectivity itself. It rather rejected any narrowed ontological assumptions that would identify the very ground of subjectivity with a univocal eidetic structure of being. In its most advanced forms, the modern and postmodern philosophy of the subject proved to be radically structuralist, relational, or even differentialist. While many attempts at Trinitarian ontology have faced this challenge either by adapting Christian dialogical personalism or reviving older metaphysical traditions and notions, e.g., the analogy, the participation, and the concept of the subsisting person, Klaus Hemmerle emphasised in his Theses Towards a Trinitarian Ontology (1976) above all the ontological primacy of the relational self-giving (Sich-Geben), explicated phenomenologically. Every subsisting being, including the human person, gains its concrete contour only from within this relational process. But does this relational reappearance of the human person mean its self-alienated completion, or rather its complete alienation? How can this relational account of the human person be related to older metaphysical, theological, and personalistic traditions? Does Hemmerle avoid the dangerous dissolution of the human person as a mere processual moment of the whole community and the world?

The Significance of Trinitarian Connotations in Bonaventure’s Epistemology for a Trinitarian Ontology

Bonaventure’s epistemology is partly based on his Trinitarian theology. This paper investigates the Trinitarian connotations in this epistemology and their broader significance. Like the divine Father, any object of human understanding is liberally generating a likeness of itself: the species. Apprehending the form of the object through this species is an essential feature of human knowledge for Bonaventure. More fundamentally, the human soul itself is structured according to the Augustinian Triad of memoria, intellectus and voluntas, and the transcendentals of being correspond to the human soul’s structure: unum, verum and bonum. Both the human being and the transcendentals of being originate ultimately from the Trinitarian life or actuality, which is a self-relation in truth and love: The Father generates a Word and both together spirate the nexus between Father and Son: the Holy Spirit. Bonaventure’s notion of Trinitarian actuality as it is imaged in the human and being itself can help deepen Aquinas’ metaphysical notion of created esse as the actuality of all acts: An enriched notion of Trinitarian actuality necessarily involves, just as Hugo of St. Victor’s notion of love, a life of personal self-communication and reception, in the context of which the speech of divine ‘suffering’ makes sense, and does not involve mutability. Understanding Trinitarian actuality as the life of love exemplary for creation might open up vistas for a mutual fertilization between Thomistic metaphysics and Bonaventure’s Trinitarian theology, so as to further the development of a Trinitarian ontology without confusing the distinction between Philosophy and Theology.

What Makes the Common Good Common? Key Points from Charles De Koninck

What Makes the Common Good Common?Key Points from Charles De Koninck1 Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P. In even the most capable philosophical hands, the common good remains a slippery concept. Its essence eludes the grasp of those who reach for it. This is due in part to the concept's complexity. "Common good" is composed of two rich, philosophically pregnant notions: goodness and commonness. Reflection on these two notions is ancient, of course. How a thing is good has preoccupied philosophers since the dawn of time. How a thing may be common has exercised philosophers less throughout history, but even the ancients recognized that the question of a thing's commonness remains as intricate as the question of a thing's goodness. Despite their long philosophical history, however, the notions of goodness and commonness evade quick and easy description. Because they represent elemental characteristics of being itself, they share in being's fundamental mystery. As a result, millennia of reflection have not exhausted these notions' meanings. Like being, goodness and commonness require careful study by each generation, so that its intellectuals and teachers might clarify these notions' remaining secrets. Thus does each generation contribute to the perennial philosophy. When we modern and post-modern thinkers try to describe the common good, and thereby grapple with its notions of goodness and commonness, we find one of these two notions more elusive than the other. Which of the two might surprise us. It is not the common good's goodness. [End Page 739] Despite the philosophical confusions of our age, we more or less still agree publicly as to what constitutes a good, and as a result what constitutes an evil. We deem health a good, for example, while we deem disease an evil. We embrace one as perfective; we repulse the other as destructive. To my knowledge, no one has yet extolled COVID-19 as a good. So, we moderns and post-moderns have not completely lost hold of reality. We still share a sense of goodness, even if our generation mislabels some evils as goods. When it comes to describing the common good, therefore, it is not the common good's goodness that eludes us. Rather, it is its commonness that we have difficulty grasping. What does it mean for a good to be common? How is a common good common? Are all common goods common in the same way? How is the example of health common? Is health a common good properly speaking, or does it only appear to be common? How do we know the difference? Is there a difference? Unfortunately, few of us can answer these questions well. The reasons may not all be our fault, but we should admit that, along with our secular contemporaries, we remain largely unversed in commonness. A sign of our inexperience with the concept is that we seldom ask questions about commonness. Instead, we take it for granted that we know what commonness involves. When pressed to describe it, however, we quickly discover just how uncommon understanding of commonness is. In the first half of the last century, Charles De Koninck was well aware of modernity's inexperience with commonness. He recognized that individualism and its philosophical prerequisites had so captured the popular imagination, even among Catholics, that the common quality of the common good was disappearing from view. As a result, political discourse—to say nothing of political life—had entered serious difficulty. Between the World Wars, De Koninck spoke up among Catholic philosophers to remind them of the "primacy of the common good," not simply as a practical concept but as a speculative one, in accord with its classical conception. De Koninck recalled for his contemporaries not only that but also how commonness, like goodness, is primarily something objectively real and metaphysically constituted, and only secondarily something subjectively perceived and practically useful. To revive the objective and metaphysical notions of goodness and commonness among Catholic intellectuals—many of whom had traded these for easier subjective and practical notions2—De [End Page 740] Koninck composed his famous essay The Primacy of the Common Good, Against the Personalists.3 In it, De Koninck spends eighty pages reviewing the objective...

Bec(h)oming with Simon Whitehead: Practising a Logic of Sensation

Abstract In this text and image essay, I introduce a new concept to the environmental humanities; one which seeks to trouble metaphysical notions of dwelling by combining the idea of home (the oikos in ecology) with a notion of permanent becoming. In this way, home loses its conservative and reactionary connotations with atavistic origins and identities and instead is opened up to nonhuman forces and powers. As I explain in the opening section, bec(h)oming is a matter of affect; it depends upon the capacity of bodies to move beyond themselves, to be impressed and transformed by the environments which they move through, to tap what the philosopher Gilbert Simondon might see as the “pre-individual” energy that runs through all organisms. Humans are no exception; they, too, are caught in the flux and flow. By focusing on bodies, the essay not only looks to depart from conventional narrative-based notions of ecocriticism and theatre ecology, it aims to provide a lexicon, a new idiom for thinking through corporeal ecologies that are attuned to sensations, the virtual play of a cosmic Earth. To do that, the text provides the first detailed account of the work and practices of influential UK movement artist Simon Whitehead, whose Locator workshop has proved pivotal for so many dancers, choreographers, and artists over the past few decades. Integral to the paper is a desire to experiment with alternative modes of writing, a style that would express the enthusiasms of bec(h)omings and give some sense of its somatic potential.

Grounding and the Epistemic Regress Problem

Modal metaphysics consumed much of the philosophical discussion at the turn of the century, yielding a number of epistemological insights. Modal analyses were applied within epistemology, yielding sensitivity and safety theories of knowledge as well as counterfactual accounts of the basing relation. The contemporary conversation has now turned to a new metaphysical notion – grounding – opening the way to a fresh wave of insights by bringing grounding into epistemology. In this paper, I attempt one such application, making sense of the epistemic regress problem in terms of grounding. I argue that the relation that generates the epistemic regress is a grounding relation, showing that grounding can make sense of proposals by epistemic foundationalists and charting the course for similar applications to epistemic coherentism and epistemic infinitism. If it is right that grounding is involved in the epistemic regress, this points the way forward both for epistemologists and metaphysicians, revealing the prospects of solutions to the epistemic regress problem while providing grounding advocates with yet another example of grounding with which to theorize.

CONFLUENCE OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO CONTEMPORARY ART PRACTICE IN INDIA

For centuries, across the worlds, artists have struggled to invent new techniques to perfect their articulation, which in turn has changed art and its relation to the viewer. In the course of art history technology has served as a useful aid to develop innovative methods for making art. For long the utilitarian notion of technology did not clash with the metaphysical or intuitive notions of art. But in modern times the reproduction technology has raised questions concerning authenticity and originality of an artwork. In the present transitory times, the digital technology is continuously redefining art and the manner in which the art/audience response circuit has undergone a paradigm shift. The present paper attempts to delineate a capsule account of the confluence between art and technology in general and discuss how Indian contemporary artists engage the art/technology interface in their art practice.

The Mystic as a Political Leader: The Impact of ‘Irfān on Imam Khomeini’s Political Doctrine

Imam Khomeini was a significant Shi‘i jurist who justified his claim to political authority on the grounds of being one of the deputies of the Hidden Imam. But it can also be argued that the Islamic mystical tradition (thereafter ‘irfān) to which he was a devotee played an important role in the formation of his general worldview, particularly the role of the mystical wayfarer in the teleology of creation and the responsibility he has of orienting people towards the sacred realm through establishing a just political order on Earth. That a political theory, Wilāyat al‑Faqīh, can be legitimized on the basis of gnostic and metaphysical notions is indeed an important and fascinating issue in today’s world. This is what the article below aims to argue.

Causal Exclusion and Grounding

In this contribution, I critically discuss the thesis, advanced by some recent writers, that nonreductive physicalists can solve the problem of causal exclusion by resorting to the metaphysical notion of grounding. After discussing the many problems confronted by very recent versions of this proposal, I conclude that a version of Nonreductive Physicalism framed in terms of a notion of realization of properties is in a better position than Grounding Physicalism in order to successfully deal with a notoriously complex metaphysical issue such as the causal exclusion problem.

Quantity as Limit

This paper deals with the metaphysics of the notion of quantity in the philosophy of Leibniz, and its aim is to defend the following bi-conditional: for any object x, x has a certain quantity if and only if x has a (metaphysical) limit or a bound. The direction from left to right is justified in §3, while in §4 I develop an argument to justify the direction from right to left. Since the bi-conditional links the metaphysical notion of limit to the mathematical notion of quantity (and in this way it links Leibniz’s metaphysics with his conception of Mathesis Universalis), it allows the use of metaphysics to clarify the features of the mathematical notion of quantity. This task is accomplished in §5 and §6. Finally, §7 discusses a possible objection.

A Philosophical Appraisal of Igbo Epistemic Metaphysical Notion of Truth

The concept of truth has been a relative notion in different eras and in varied philosophical and historical context. On that very day Pilate directed to Jesus the question, what is truth?; truth has become a preponderant problem in philosophical discourses though not preposterous in the sense that it is not over and above human comprehensibility. Undoubtedly, the conception of truth is relative to different societies of the world just as philosophy varies geographically. This is certainly as a result of the geographical setting of the society in question, coupled with the cultural inclination and social interaction among members of the society. To this end, truth has been one of the most important, if not the most important issue in the history of Man. Philosophy in itself is built on the excavation of truth in its changing nature. With critical and reflective approach, therefore, this study is geared towards excavating the Igbo epistemic and metaphysical notion of truth.

„Moartea autorului”. Analiza multispectrală a unui topos cultural

The present reflection proposes a novel investigation method in humanities, consisting in the analysis of local phenomena as originating in the dynamic of cultural `deep structures`. My focus falls on the death of the author which I consider to be a topos and a myth of last century’s humanities. The death of the author is associated with the Hegelian eschatological philosophy of history, but may also be deciphered as a consequence of the acute manifestation, within an entire culture, of the Kantian antinomy regarding the necessary existence of a transcendent being. As transcendent to the work, the author is refuted – because, as Hugo Friedrich shows, the modern artistic conscience intuited the empty ideality of traditional metaphysical notions –. Thus, the death of the author must be inquired upon not only as a particular phenomenon within the evolution of art, but also as a symptom of certain transformations that precede the aesthetical domain, transformations that are characteristic to the late Modernity and integrant of a `multispectral` analysis (with scopes in metaphysics, archetype and myth analysis). Such a methodological exigence is based on the assumption that a cultural phenomenon ought to be integrated within the scientific paradigm it expresses and also within the ontological and cosmological models around which it is articulated. An approach such as this shall reveal that the death of the author represents and intellectual version of the death of God, further assimilated to a cultural archetype, that of the death of Meaning. Consequently, the postmodern deicide represents the imposal of negation as a form of thought, a Western thought headed, with the end of Modernity, against the metaphysical tradition (of Presence) that it stems from. I assume that the self-destruction of Western tradition is symptom of a profound crisis of identity and I interpret it as a symbolic violence meant to redeem the fault of 20th Century’s atrocities, by cleansing the guilt the Western man experiences. My approach to the analysis of myth engages the actual debate regarding the canonical fights of the last few decades while trying to shed light on the way in which the symbolic deicide of the (`secularized`) author and auctor aims at imposing a new author and a new auctor to the symbolic products of culture. Ideology is the new auctorial authority.

AFASTAMENTO DE PASCAL DA TEORIA CARTESIANA DO PROBLEMA DA POSSIBILIDADE DO CONHECIMENTO EM GERAL

The present article aims to investigate how Blaise Pascal theoretically moved away from Rene Descartes – a pioneer who was with his theories in force in the 17th century - about to the problem of the possibility of knowledge in general, he also rejects the Cartesian metaphysical structure in his philosophy. That is, we want to see that, distancing himself from the notions exposed in the book Rules for the direction of the spirit on the first principles of knowledge, Pascal also distances himself from Cartesian metaphysical notions, building a metaphysics that sees the subject differently from Descartes's. In this perspective, the main texts mobilized will be On the Geometric Spirit and On the art of persuading and Thoughts on Pascal, and on Descartes, in addition to the Rules, the Preface Letter to the Principles of Philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas and William E. Carroll on Creatio ex Nihilo: A Response to Joseph Hannon’s “Theological Objections to a Metaphysicalist Interpretation of Creation”

ABSTRACT Joseph Hannon has expressed a most surprising objection to Aquinas scholar Prof William E. Carroll in his latest paper “Theological Objections to a Metaphysicalist Interpretation of Creation.” The main claim is that Prof. Carroll misunderstands Aquinas' doctrine of creatio ex nihilo by reducing it to a metaphysical notion, rather than considering it in its full theological sense. In this paper I show Hannon's misinterpretation of Carroll's and Thomas Aquinas' thought, particularly by stressing the dependence that the doctrine of providence through secondary causes has on the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

Victimhood in Bataille‘s Reading of Sade and in Popular Sovereignty

This article reveals three aspects of victimhood in Bataille’s reading of Sade (of the other, of the self, and Sade’s language) and relates them to some of Bataille’s metaphysical and political notions: the impossible, the general and the restricted economy, sovereignty, and transgression. Doing so shows a progressive simplification of possibilities for transgression from the pre-Christian world to that of popular sovereignty, i.e., the sovereignty of the crowd, the latter leaving open one avenue for transgression: Sadean victimhood. The article then applies these aspects to the pamphlet in Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir, “Frenchmen, Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Republicans,” in relation to a contemporaneous document of popular sovereignty, the preamble to the Constitution of the Year III, titled “Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and Citizen.” Attending to the aspects of Sadean victimhood in “Effort” shows that its system’s very impossibility makes it the Declaration’s logical completion. Finally, that impossibility is revealed as the sovereignty of the masses, distinct from that of the crowd.

The Unavoidability of Nature - the Struggle of Erich Przywara and Chantal Delsol to Reintroduce the Concept

The history of modern philosophy has been marked by a retreat from traditional metaphysical concepts, including the notion of nature, which is central to theological considerations. It allows us to recognize a direct connection between the ordered world of nature and the existence of God. Still, some theologians paradoxically welcomed the downfall of metaphysics. Acknowledging the irreversibility of changes in the intellectual landscape of contemporary culture, and following Heidegger’s critique of the so-called ontotheology, they stated that one can and should “do” theology without resorting to metaphysical concepts, like the concept of nature. In this paper I am revisiting the work of two thinkers that defended the concept of nature. They represent two generations of 20th and 21st century Christian theologians (Erich Przywara) and philosophers (Chantal Delsol) who assiduously sought to reintroduce the concept of nature to the mainstream of intellectual discourse. Tracing their footsteps, we shall see that intellectual systems inspired by Christianity actually need the concept of nature, or its equivalent. What is common to both scholars is that they try to achieve this goal indirectly, by substituting the concepts of classical metaphysics. As mentioned, modern critique left metaphysical notions with a bad reputation (undeservedly, in our opinion), but Przywara and Delsol replace them with related concepts that latter-day thinkers find easier to accept.

ADORNO, GADAMER, THE WORK OF ART AND THE RETRIEVAL OF THE SACRED

This paper considers the significant role the sacred played in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Theodor Adorno’s theories of post Enlightenment rationality and experience. While these thinkers are typically thought to be at odds with one another, on this topic, as will become evident, their work remained proximate: both appealed at crucial points to theological models, somewhat controversially, to combat the limitations of strict methodological accounts of their rational. This paper first traces their mutual reliance in this endeavor upon Kantian and post- -Kantian accounts of aesthetics, which imported classical metaphysical notions of Truth, Beauty, and the Good into their accounts. Against this backdrop, I trace how Gadamer and Adorno employed theological models to articulate accounts of the poverty of contemporary experience and theory, affording possibilities for its reinterpretation. Thereby, both viewed the sacred as a still not exhausted critical reserve in our rational history, one that extends beyond the constraints of Enlightenment, precisely in posing the critical question of tradition itself: the question, as Adorno put it, of how “a thinking obliged to relinquish tradition might preserve and transform tradition.”

German Idealism and Tragic Maturity

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin viewed value conflict as tragic, as it requires the sacrifice of some values for others. It is a mark of maturity, he thought, to accept this tragic truth. This view raises certain conceptual problems that can be attributed to Berlin’s subtle departures from the German authors (Kant, Schelling, and Hegel) who originated the doctrine of tragic maturity—figures who had, in turn, transformed the earlier idea that enlightenment is a natural and morally neutral process of maturation. Kant moralized the notion of enlightened maturation by portraying it as contingent on our courage to bring it about, such that we are responsible if we remain immature. This theory of maturity rested on the idea, which would have been uncongenial to Berlin, that we are intelligible creatures inhabiting the noumenal realm, duty bound to exercise moral freedom, even though this duty surpasses our ability to carry it out, as we also inhabit the phenomenal realm, where our natural inclinations tend to make us resist laboring to fulfill our duties. However, according to Kant, the metaphysical limitations we face as individuals can be transcended to an extent, allowing us to make moral progress as a species—so long as we do not lazily persist in our immaturity. Schelling built upon Kant’s notion of freedom to bring out the tragic and heroic dimension of individual moral life, where the tragedy is our doomed but noble struggle to exert moral freedom in a world of natural necessity. Hegel turned these metaphysical notions in a more recognizably Berlinian direction by extending Schelling’s account of tragic conflict to conflicts of values. But he identified the ultimate tragic hero as an ethical totality that enacts eternal justice by reconciling such conflicts, while Berlin attempted to repudiate both the notion of a historical totality and the possibility of reconciliation on empirical grounds, even though these are metaphysical claims. Thus, Berlin asserted the absolute, trans-historical necessity of tragic value conflict, while the evidence for this assertion was merely his personal conviction that in his particular time and place, specific values were, as a matter of empirical fact, tragically irreconcilable. In this manner he illicitly portrayed Cold War value pluralists (such as himself) as courageously accepting the tragic inevitability of value conflict, while Marxists, the legatees of Hegel and thus German Idealism, immaturely shrank from this reality by embracing the fantasy of total reconciliation.

Tetractys

Abstract Tetractys was a Greek technical term, specific to the Pythagorean tradition, that the late antique neoplatonist philosophers considered to be the central notion of Pythagorean metaphysics. As the Greek philosophical heritage started to be translated into Arabic, this term also made its way into the new language, resulting in a number of different translations. This paper explores the ways in which the term tetractys was expressed in Arabic and then explained to the medieval islamicate readers. By comparing the ways in which specific authors and intellectual circles coped with a technical term that no longer assumed the philosophical significance it had had in Late Antiquity, I show the vagaries of the Greco-Arabic translation movement. The changing renderings and understandings of this term offers a great opportunity to understand the different factors that influenced the course of translating the Greek heritage into the Arabic world.

Nietzsche’deki Üstinsan Düşüncesinin Fikir Babası Olarak “Kallikles”

Felsefe tarihinin geleneksel metafizik anlayışlarına, modern dünyanın yerleşik ahlaki değerlerine ve Hristiyanlığa yönelttiği eleştiriler ile adından söz ettiren Nietzsche, çağına karşı yapmış olduğu toptan bir karşı çıkış ile tanınır. Nietzsche’ye göre hayatı sürdürmeyi sağlayan değerler değerini kaybetmiş, sağlam temeller üzerinde durmamakta ve böylece soylu bir yaşam sürdürmeyi imkânsız hâle getirmektedir. Çünkü var olan değerler zayıf, güçsüz karakterli insanlar tarafından belirlenmekte ve ruhen fakir olana neyin yaradığına bağlı kılınmaktadır. Sempati, tevazu ve merhamet gibi özellikler erdem seviyesine çıkarılmakta, eşitlik yüceltilmekte, güçlü ve bağımsız birey ise tehlikeli ve kötü olarak değerlendirilmektedir. Böylesi bir durum insanı ve yaşamı sahteleştirmektir. Eğer hayatı idame ettiren değer yapısı çökmüşse değerlerin yeniden değerlendirmesi şarttır. Bu noktada Nietzsche, insanı kendi iradesi aracılığıyla kendi hayatının sorumluluğunu almaya davet etmekte, insanı her türlü bağımlılıktan uzaklaştırarak kendi ayakları üzerinde durmaya çağırmakta ve çözüm olarak “üstinsan”ı önermektedir.Hakkındaki bilgiyi Platon’un “Gorgias” diyalogundan edindiğimiz ve Nietzsche’den yaklaşık 24 asır önce yaşadığı varsayılan ünlü bir Sofist olan Kallikles’de de Nietzsche’nin mevcut değerlere yöneltmiş olduğu eleştirilerin benzerlerini görmekteyiz. Tıpkı Nietzsche gibi Kallikles de toplumun “erdem” olarak gördüğü kanaatkârlık, fedakârlık, ölçülü olmak gibi durumları bir erdem olarak kabul etmemektedir. Çünkü bunlar zayıf karakterli insanların uzlaşımı sonucu onların çıkarları gözetilerek elde edilir. Zayıflar, güçlüleri korkutur; onların kazanmasını engeller. Hâlbuki Kallikles, insanlardan bu erdemlere olan bağlarını parçalayarak onlardan kurtulma cesaretini göstermelerini ister. Bu noktada gözünü budaktan sakınmayan “gözü pek” insana işaret etmektedir. Bu görüşü ile Kallikles belki de kendisinden çok sonra yaşayan Nietzsche’nin üstinsan düşüncesini ortaya atmasında fikir babalığı yapmıştır.

Essence and Explanation

In Necessary Beings, Bob Hale addresses two questions: What is the source of necessity? What is the source of our knowledge of it? He offers novel responses to them in terms of the metaphysical notion of nature or, more familiarly, essence. In this paper, I address Hale’s response to the first question. My assessment is negative. I argue that his essentialist explanation of the source of necessity suffers from three significant shortcomings. First, Hale’s leading example of an essentialist explanation merely asserts that the nature of an entity explains some necessity, but leaves unexplained how it does so. Second, his essentialist explanation of particular necessities introduces new necessities that remain unexplained. Third, Hale’s version of essentialism presupposes a controversial metaphysical theory of properties, for which he offers no defense.