Traditional Metaphysics Research Articles

Heidegger and the “Situation” of Ethics

It is often stated that the German twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger never wrote an ethics while undertaking his critique and deconstruction of the Western tradition of metaphysics. It is, therefore, difficult to know what manner of normative ethics, if any, is consistent with his “hermeneutic of Dasein” such as articulated in his Being and Time. However, in his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger refers to the tragedies of Sophocles as “preserving the ēthos” more originally, thus better, than does Aristotle’s ethics. Hence, one may examine Sophocles’s tragedies guided by the hermeneutic Heidegger provides, especially through the concepts of authenticity and authentic selfhood. Doing so, it is argued here that Sophocles’s Philoctetes presents one such opportunity for moral understanding in the interplay of authenticity and inauthenticity, in particular through a study of the moral dilemma that Neoptolemus must resolve as he moves from a situation of inauthenticity to a display of authentic resolve.

Izutsu’s Zen Metaphysics of I-Consciousness vis-à-vis Cartesian Cogito

Chief amongst the issues Toshihiko Izutsu broached is the philosophisation of Zen Buddhism in his book Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism. This article aims to critically compare Izutsu’s reconstruction of Zen metaphysics with another metaphysical tradition rooted in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. Putting Izutsu’s terminological choices into the context of Zen Buddhism, we review his argument based on the subject-object distinction and establish a comparison with the Cartesian cogito. A critical analysis is conducted on the functional relationship between subject and object in Izutsu’s metaphysics of Zen (meditation). This is examined step by step from the perspective of Descartes’ Meditations. On the one hand, we focus on prima facie similarities in meditative and reflective methodologies used by the Zen and Cartesian approaches. On the other, we highlight some unequivocal differences in the metaphysical role of the subject: an indubitable foundation for the epistemological access to objective reality (Descartes), and an introspective apprehension of the egoless void or absolute reality (Zen).

Dazzle and the origins of drawing

The subject of the study is the problem of drawing in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and, in particular, the so-called "blindness hypothesis", which Derrida expresses in the work "Memoirs of a blind man: self-portrait and other ruins": "drawing ... and the drawing operation must have some relation to blindness." Derrida explores this well—established ontotheological tradition of classical metaphysics: blinding here becomes a necessary sacrificial act, a condition that makes possible the transition from the physical eye to the spiritual, so Derrida describes it as a "sacrificial" economy, which is inevitably followed by an artist, each drawing of which turns out to be a prophecy of a blind man, indicating the horizons of the future.  Explicating Derrida's hypothesis, we turn not only directly to the text of the "Memoirs of a Blind Man" and the documentary narrative film that accompanied it, but also strive to reconstruct the exhibition of the same name held at the Louvre in 1990, which was also curated by Derrida. The comparison of these three layers made it possible to more fully reveal the "blindness hypothesis" and fit it into a more general philosophical context of deconstruction, as well as to rethink the problems of figurative drawing, its mimetic and representative nature. We come to the conclusion that the essence of the drawing has nothing to do with the visible, and its source lies entirely at the level of memory.

Schopenhauer’ın Yeter Sebep İlkesinin Dörtlü Kökü Üzerine

Schopenhauer assumes that our physical drives, on which depend our desires and wants, set the ground of knowledge and being. These drives are in the very source of our biological as well as our intellectual acts, i.e. at the essential content of man as a rational being. Moreover, not only men, but all beings, organic and inorganic get objectivity as a product of will. Will is the thing-in-itself which shows itself in the reality as a whole and in individual objects. Schopenhauer argues that the thing-in-itself is will. In short, he will say that the “thing-in-itself” has an intelligible quality and that it is “will”. Kant associates the unknown character of the first cause with the inconclusive research of causes. This case, known as “the third antinomy”, takes the principle of causality to the impossibility of the existence of the first cause. Schopenhauer’s famous criticism of Kant relies on this point. Thus, he goes on to construct his own theory of causality and of space-time. Schopenhauer does this in the context of the sufficient reason principle. This study examines how this principle is handled by Schopenhauer in the famous fourfold root doctrine. According to Schopenhauer, there are four principles that govern four separate classes of objects. It is precisely this last principle which opens the way to Schopenhauer's metaphysics of will. His original interpretation appears at this point against traditional metaphysics. This study examines the theoretical roots of this philosopher's later, practical tendencies.

Do Espírito aos Espectros

O ensaio parte do debate sobre o espírito na filosofia francesa do século XX Ã luz da desconstrução de Jacques Derrida, tensionando a relação entre fala, signo, sopro e pneuma, de um lado, e escrita, grafema e rastro, de outro, tomando a posição derridiana como um materialismo. A partir disso, debate como recuperar a espectralidade depois da desconstrução, em contraste com o espírito da metafísica tradicional, e problematiza a questão a partir de Stefan Andriopoulos e Fabian Ludueña Romandini. Finalmente, retorna ao espírito para pensá-lo sob as duas formas ”” conflagração e sublimação ”” e a partir da chave espírito/espectro contrasta as duas vias do pensamento contemporâneo, suas implicações cosmopolíticas e relação com o niilismo.

The Privilege of the Present: Time and the Trace from Heidegger to Derrida

ABSTRACT One of the starting points of Derrida’s deconstruction is the idea that metaphysics is dominated by an ontological primacy of the present. It is well known that Derrida took up this thesis of the ‘privilege of the present’ in metaphysics from Heidegger. However, this thesis is mentioned without being developed by Heidegger. What is the meaning of this ontological position? How did it originate? Should we try to go beyond it? And if so, how? In this paper, I would like to start out from Heidegger’s view that the understanding of Being, in the metaphysical tradition, is dominated by the ontological primacy of the present: according to this approach, which goes back to Aristotle’s theory of substance (ousia), Being means constant presence; only that which is constantly present really exists. I will then show that Heidegger himself, in his conception of the past, has renewed the privilege of the present, favoring the ‘having been’ (Gewesenheit) over the past as ‘by-gone-ness’ (Vergangenheit). Finally, I will show how Derrida’s concept of trace may help us to go beyond the privilege of the present.

God and the Structure of the Transcendental Dialectic: On Willaschek’s Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics

AbstractMarcus Willaschek’s new book Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics: The Dialectic of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a penetrating analysis of the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In his comments, the author first raises some questions concerning the structure of the Transcendental Dialectic (and Willaschek’s reconstruction of it) and then proposes that looking at the second Critique and continuing on into the third Critique will reveal more roles for the idea of God in Kant’s reconstruction of traditional metaphysics than Willaschek’s treatment suggests.

Old problems for neo-positivist naturalized metaphysics

In her paper “Neo-positivist metaphysics” (Philosophical Studies, 160(1), 53–78, 2012), Alyssa Ney promises a naturalized metaphysics that is acceptable even by positivists’ – and specifically Carnap’s – standards. This neo-positivist metaphysics takes its outset in the findings of our best science and relies on them to inform a metaphysics that can avoid the dependence on linguistic frameworks that is inherent to Carnapian deflationism. Neo-positivist metaphysics attempts to sidestep these problems by inheriting its semantic credentials directly from science itself. This paper argues that such attempts are unsuccessful since science contains no resources with which to answer Carnap’s challenge either, and a science-based metaphysics is therefore just as vulnerable to Carnapian deflationism as traditional metaphysics. Consequently, neo-positivist metaphysics does not provide the promised metaphysics that can avoid Carnapian deflationism. While this conclusion focuses on Ney’s neo-positivist metaphysics, its scope includes any attempt to avoid Carnapian deflationism by a naturalized metaphysics that relies on strict deference to the findings of science. Substantial metaphysics – naturalized or not – is impossible unless or until Carnapian deflationism is refuted, and the resources for such a refutation cannot be found in naturalized metaphysics.

The Deleuzian Revolution: Ten Innovations inDifference and Repetition

Difference and Repetition might be said to have brought about a Deleuzian Revolution in philosophy comparable to Kant's Copernican Revolution. Kant had denounced the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics – self, world and God – as transcendent illusions, and Deleuze pushes Kant's revolution to its limit by positing a transcendental field that excludes the coherence of the self, world and God in favour of an immanent and differential plane of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities. In the process, he introduces numerous conceptual innovations into philosophy: the becoming of concepts; a transformation of the form of the question; an insistence that philosophy must start in the middle; an attempt to think in terms of multiplicities; the development of a new logic and a new metaphysics based on a concept of difference; a new conception of space as intensive rather than extensive; a conception of time as a pure and empty form; and an understanding of philosophy as a system in heterogenesis – that is, a system that entails a perpetual genesis of the heterogeneous, an incessant production of the new.

Implicaciones para la estética del pensamiento de Xavier Zubiri

En este ensayo se hace una valoración de la situación actual de la estética y se estudia cuál es la aportación del pensamiento del filósofo español X. Zubiri a la misma. Para ello se reconstruye a grandes rasgos la historia del pensamiento estético hasta el momento actual de modo que sean claramente perceptibles las aportaciones a la estética de la propuesta del pensador español, a la vez que las posibilidades que abre para un desarrollo ulterior de esta disciplina. Para mostrar las aportaciones a la estética de Zubiri se exponen las características fundamentales de su pensamiento en las que destaca su raigambre estrictamente metafísica. Esta raigambre metafísica permite evitar un reduccionismo hermenéutico de la estética tal y como ocurre según el autor en muchas propuestas actuales. Por otro lado, la propuesta zubiriana de incardinar lo estético en una facultad sustantiva como es el sentimiento afectante, permite evitar el intelectualismo y rescatar la autonomía de la dimensión estética de la realidad sin reducirla al bien ni el ser neutro. La propuesta es una alternativa a la teoría de Max Scheler que, no obstante, vuelve a hacerse cargo de la estructura transcendental de la realidad como ocurría en la gran tradición metafísica occidental.

What Society? Invisible Machines, Control, and Niklas Luhmann's Theory of Society

What Society?Invisible Machines, Control, and Niklas Luhmann's Theory of Society Cristina Iuli (bio) The ubiquity of notions of communication and control is a reflex of the success that the discourse of Cybernetics as a regime of signification gained from the second half of the twentieth century, when an epistemology based on the systemic relation between information, function and communication spread across heterogeneous disciplinary domains and eventually became an epistemological dominant. The emphasis on communication, in the specific declination that followed a well-known trajectory in the history of post-World War II first and second order cybernetics,1 is crucial to Niklas Luhmann's theory of society, which addresses modern society not in the conventional terms of classical sociology, as an organization of groups, individuals, or communities, but as a plurality of interdependent, self-organizing, and self-propelling functional systems whose operations consist of communications, and which process and manage their environment through their own communication. Modern society, in Luhmann's view, exists and is organized by the interactions of a series of functionally autonomous, specialized subsystems—politics, law, science, art, education, etc.—that establish themselves autologically by applying self-referential codes carrying the principle of selectivity by means of which they organize and reproduce themselves, their own organization and their own elements recursively, as communication, from an environment that—to paraphrase Ludwig Von Foerster—knows no communication. The two fundamentals of this theory are that the functional distinction between system/environment replaces all ontological binarisms inherited by the metaphysical tradition (subject/object; body/mind; culture/nature; individual/society), and that the relation between any system and its environment is always asymmetrical because the principle of selectivity deployed by systems to define their relation to the environment is by [End Page 133] definition limited by their specific self-referential code; consequently, any system is always less complex than its environment. Following these two axioms, Luhmann's sociology reconceptualizes the relation that classical sociology establishes between subjects, objects and social space as a relation of systems, environments and communication, and redefines communication itself as "the specific operation whose autopoietic process leads to the formation of social systems in corresponding environments"2 (2012, 41). In this view, society surfaces as a complex "network of communication" (1990, 100) that bootstraps and recursively reproduces its own organization as communication in the context of overwhelmingly complex environmental conditions. In this perspective, communication clearly means something very different from the "transference" of meaning or information between a sender and a receiver, or from the process of encoding and decoding of signs. Similarly, meaning indicates something very different from a quantity of mental or ontologically given content to be exchanged between minds or people. Reconfigured through the language of information theory and second order cybernetics, meaning is conceptualized as the medium through which social and psychic systems—societies and minds—process their difference from the environment and from each other. This difference is then observed and "re-entered" into the system by the system as a form that presents simultaneously the difference between what is actualized and what is excluded. The inclusion/exclusion dynamics paradoxically keeps available for future reference what is excluded by the very act of selection as reference to other, not actualized possibilities. This is why Luhmann defines meaning as the two-sided form of the contingent difference between what is actual and what is potential, and argues that each meaning, which "exists only as meaning of the operations using it, and hence only at the moment in which it is determined by operations, neither beforehand, nor afterward," always means "itself and other things" (2012, 18, 20).3 This excursus on meaning is important in our discussion of the reproduction of society, as we will see, because meaning is the adaptive, universal medium through which psychic and social systems have co-evolved by integrating the difference between information, utterance and understanding and by deploying it to continue their autopoiesis as either consciousness [End Page 134] (in the case of mental operations) or communication (in the case of social operations). Through meaning, these systems have evolved by developing increasingly sophisticated, time-constituting structures to build their internal complexity in order to better adapt...

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart

Reviewed by: That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart Taylor Patrick O'Neill That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 222 pp. What can one say about David Bentley Hart's That All Shall Be Saved? It does not seem to be a text which admits of moderate responses. Its readers seem almost exclusively to laud it as a new epoch in Christian theology or to condemn it as a screed of ad hominems which rejects the vast majority of Christians throughout history. Still, one wants to be as positive as one can, if for no other reason than that after reading That All Shall Be Saved one thirsts desperately for even a drop of irenicism. I have three major thoughts about Hart's work, which is broken up into four "Meditations." My first thought deals with the mode of Hart's prose and argumentation; the second and third deal briefly with two of the arguments themselves. First, much has been made about the form of Hart's delivery (both here and in previous works), and I think justifiably so. Even after completing the work, I am still unsure as to what Hart's intentions with the book were. It often reads more like a personal journal or the beginnings of a comprehensive work which is still gestating than a work of speculative theology. Hart spends substantial time earlier in the book discussing his own experiences and history. He never directly engages any particular theological text, historical or contemporary. Names and ideas are referenced in passing but never cited. A single contemporary text is mentioned but hardly explored (Brian Davies's The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil takes that honor). One keeps expecting the rhetorical setup to punch through to a complete argument on the next page, but the blow never lands. There are the beginnings of very interesting ideas here, but the times in which they are argued forcefully or even fleshed out are few and far between. The work concludes with a basic re-hashing of the post-modern trope on the genesis of the doctrine of hell: the Church, especially when it mixed with temporal powers, duplicitously concocted an error to keep the rabble in line. The rhetoric is rich, but there is not an ounce of historical evidence to back up the claim. On the very final pages of the book, Hart seems to be alert to [End Page 1399] the lack of argumentation, saying: "I could go on. I could, if nothing else, spend a few hundred pages more dealing with certain highly technical issues of Christian metaphysical tradition. … But I do not think that it would actually add anything to the essential arguments of these pages," (207–8). It is hard to overstate how frustrating it is to find this statement nestled at the end of over two hundred pages. Indeed, the debate about the existence of an eternal hell is in so many ways a debate which absolutely must take place upon the metaphysical level. I would like to see this argument in its fullest and most robust form. Instead, all we receive is, frankly, a lot of preaching to the choir with rhetorical flourishes. Hart's grasp of the English language is probably unmatched by any living theologian, and yet he transgresses the fundamental principle of writing: show rather than tell. One particularly disappointing trend throughout the work is the use of false dilemmas. Hart tends to pick the lowest hanging fruit as a bogey man, threatening you with the most radical of positions as the only alternative to his own. One is either a Hartian or a double-predestinarian, Calvinist infernalist. And gleeful about it too! One agrees with Hart that St. John's Revelation is "hazy to the point of unintelligibility" or else one is looking for "some kind of visionary script for the end of time, a magic mirror for scrying out things yet to come" (108). Either universalism or else radical individualism where "the ethos of heaven turns out to be 'every soul...

Metaphysics’ Accountability Gap

This article suggests a frame for thinking together Hegel and Schelling’s competing mature approaches to metaphysics. It argues that both reject modern metaphysics’ belief that there exists such a thing as the “world’s ontology.” In their mature philosophies, Hegel and Schelling develop metaphysical approaches based on what I call the “accountability gap.” For Hegel, reason is a matter of thinking under conceptual presuppositions we come to know and evaluate in hindsight. Hegel gives up on the modern rationalist idea that reason can in principle account for what the world is like without introducing assumptions. In the Logic, he concludes that metaphysics should be reconsidered along the lines of normative authority by freeing it of the commitment to thorough accountability. I describe a similar process in Schelling’s post-1809 metaphysics. In his middle period, Schelling describes traditional metaphysics as unable to account for reason’s creative basis. Reason gets its bearings creatively in a way systematic thinking cannot account for from within. Schelling concludes that reason’s authority arises from “creative storytelling” and not from laying out the world’s ontology. This paper argues for an accountability gap as a helpful construct to draw out the stakes of Hegel and Schelling’s metaphysics.

How the World Really Ends: Adorno on Working through Catastrophes to Come

How the World Really EndsAdorno on Working through Catastrophes to Come Michael Berlin (bio) Writing under the threat of nuclear war, Theodor W. Adorno remained strikingly silent about its possibility. From the perspective of the present, this relative silence by an author who was elsewhere so eloquent on the subject of catastrophe could appear as a lacuna that confirms the charge of quietism that has hung over his work. Yet, at a time in which buzzwords around the topic of climate change proliferate, this absence appears prescient. In eschewing epochal terms like “the nuclear age,” Adorno’s writing lets the bomb stand as an absence that focalizes the everydayness of the processes that could lead to its use.1 In its simultaneous elevation and disavowal of human agency, the language with which nuclear war and climate change have been theorized works to naturalize catastrophe as a fated outcome of history.2 Anticipating the latter through the former, Adorno perceived that there were those for whom the threat of nuclear annihilation served as a sublime limit of the human that would force humanity to think of a “world without us” and others for whom it would demand a new humanism that could assume responsibility for risk on a planetary scale.3 By no means opposed to each other, these two views come together in a metaphysics that is caught between a “we” that would constitute the human and the world in which we could act. Critiquing the terms in which these questions are posed, Adorno’s postwar writing draws a connection between the scale in which a catastrophe is thought and the political possibilities that could emerge in its wake. Then, as now, Adorno’s work demonstrates that such theorizations of the end of the world remain eschatological in their attempt to find anew humanity’s proper place in a universe it can control. Adorno’s critical theory anticipates the prevalence of the term “Anthropocene” in its resistance to the idea that humanity’s domination of [End Page 112] nature is either “recent” (kainos), or reducible to a single definition of “man” (anthropos). If the word “world” itself already encodes the idea of “the age of man” (David, 1217),4 then Adorno’s working through the intellectual fixation on the world’s ending elucidates how these fantasies authorize the catastrophes that occur for the sake of its survival. Rather than trying to simply find another way forward, Adorno analyzed the twinned pulls of triumphalism and guilt that this immense capacity for destruction engenders in those who envision a global future. By drawing attention to the ways an attachment to the world can easily justify its maintenance as is, Adorno’s work asks “why the world—which could be paradise here and now—become hell itself tomorrow” not only by projecting a world in which things could be otherwise (1998a, 14), but by unearthing how they have so stubbornly remained the same. This essay begins in the immediacy of the postwar with a letter from Adorno to his parents. Folding past and future potential for collective murder into a complex of guilt, this letter points to how those who feel responsible for past catastrophes come to accept such violence as a preordained outcome of historical processes. Turning to Minima Moralia, in which Adorno identified this fatefulness with the entry of perpetual war into the rhythm of everyday life, it explores how Adorno’s representations of totality locate hope for its transformation in the realm of banal matters of fact, rather than in that of transcendent possibility. Opposed to the global scale in which nuclear war and climate change continue to be thought, Adorno offered a theorization of regression that shows that, if the world were to really end, the processes that would finally bring it about would have had to have been rationalized long ago. Against a return to traditional metaphysics at the end of the world, Adorno’s critical sociology takes aim at the philosophic resignation that pervaded German thought of the postwar and answers the work of contemporary thinkers like Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bruno Latour, and Timothy Morton. Writing to his parents in the aftermath of the Second World...

Latest Developments of Existentialism

In this paper, Pareyson provides an analysis of the existential features of the philosophies of Jaspers and Heidegger, that he considers as the two greatest philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. In Jaspers, Pareyson identifies the idea that truth is both singular and one, meaning that it can be grasped only through a personal interpretation and never in absolute terms. This implies that truth and person are inseparably tied to each other and that existence carries transcendence in itself: just as truth transcends our personal knowledge of it, Being itself transcends our personal existence. Moreover, Pareyson sees Heidegger as the initiator of an existential ontology that poses a fundamental relation between the human being and Being itself; hence, the philosophical discourse on human existence inevitably turns into a discourse on Being. Therefore, Heidegger finally manages to overcome traditional metaphysics and its forgetfulness of the question of Being itself, by giving such question a central role within philosophical reflection. In conclusion, Pareyson maintains that Jaspers and Heidegger are able to make the voice of Being been heard, in contrast with the humanist and nihilist tendencies of twentieth century philosophy.

The Pauline Understanding of Life in the Young Heidegger (1920–21)

Abstract In the years after the First World War many authors returned to the Apostle Paul to rethink the meaning of history in a time of crisis. In this period the problem of time represents a crucial topic of Heidegger’s philosophy as well, through which he reconsiders the meaning of the Being of the whole metaphysical tradition. Heidegger already develops his reconsideration of temporality in his early Freiburg lectures on the phenomenology of religious life through the interpretation of Paul’s epistles. The article focuses on the analysis of the category of temporality in these lectures, where the philosopher investigates the experience of conversion and the expectation of the parusia in the proto-Christian communities, within which the radically historical dimension of existence clearly emerges. This contribution aims to show that such phenomenological analysis of early Christian temporality emphasizes the disquieting nature of the evangelical message, which unsettles any fixed identity and transforms personal, communitarian history and social, opening it to the future.

Trading Ontology for Ideology (and Vice Versa)

In this paper, I defend modal dimensionalism against the objection that it is ontologically and ideologically heavy. First, I briefly outline the theory and the objection against it. The objection relies on the widely accepted view that ontological and ideological parsimony are operational criteria when comparing metaphysical theories. Second, I outline the conventional distinction between ontology and ideology in the metaphysical tradition. Third, I challenge a particular kind of parsimony: reduction by identification. Fourth, even if reduction by identification is accepted, I show that theories that pursue this often minimize differences, and that such minimization paves the way to epistemic underdetermination. Finally, I demonstrate that some theories in modal metaphysics also suffer from difference minimization and should thus not be measured on the ontology/ideology scale (contra the objection from heaviness).

How Individuals Constitute Group Agents

AbstractSeveral social metaphysicians have argued that groups are constituted by, but not identical to, their members. While the constitution view is promising, there are significant difficulties with existing versions of that view. Fortunately, lessons may be extracted from more traditional metaphysics and applied to the case of group agents. Drawing on such lessons, I present a novel account of the constitution relation holding between individuals and group agents. According to the resulting structural-constitution view, when individuals constitute a group of a certain kind, they do so in virtue of exhibiting the structure characteristic of groups of that kind.

Pеter Lnitskyi as an Apologist Metaphysics in “Age of Science”

The article is about metaphysical studies of Peter Linitskyi’s (1839–1906), a professor of the Department of Logic and Metaphysics in the Kyiv Theological Academy. For many years P. Linitskyi taught students of the Academy all parts of metaphysics. The author of the article examines all approaches to metaphysical issues that the Kyiv professor held. Special attention is paid to the arguments that P. Linitskyі used to protect metaphysics from attempts to prove its inability to formulate theoretical knowledge about transcendental objects – God, Soul, World. Deep analysis conducted by P. Linitskyi with regard to the purpose and task of metaphysics revealed different principles of construction and substantiation of metaphysical knowledge, significant impact that metaphysics of materialistic philosophy of that time had on metaphysics, as well as positivism, which despite all the criticism of metaphysical doctrine, showed a strong connection with and dependence on metaphysical principles and concepts of positivism even derived from metaphysics. A concept of “Matter” in materialistic philosophy (C. Vogt, L. Büchner, J. Moleschott), “the Unknowable” concepts of the positivists (H. Spencer) – all these doctrines meet the basic criteria of transcendent reality, which is the subject of traditional metaphysics. In his studies of the origins of metaphysics, P. Linitskyi draws the reader’s attention to those conceptual approaches that reduced metaphysics to psychical motives such as interest, curiosity, desire to discover new truths about “hidden” things, search for answers to questions caused by fear of death, egoism or altruism, intent on explaining transcendent things based on his knowledge. Not ignoring these subjective motives of metaphysics, Kyiv professor believed that metaphysics needs to be studied and explained more thoroughly, namely, what is a logical-epistemological and categorical definition of the subject of metaphysics, as well as the recognition of theological basis which lays in cognition of it. Only a combination of all these factors allows existence of metaphysics as a philosophical science. Article received 08.08.2019

Unfounding an American tradition: or the performative invention of self in Ralph Waldo Emerson

ABSTRACTOne of the reasons why Emerson’s work is little recognised as philosophical is that it does not make any particular effort to distance itself from literature, nor even to keep it at bay. Unlike the Western metaphysical tradition founded by Plato, the tradition of thought of which Emerson is the founder does not make separation from the letters its founding act. On the contrary, Transcendentalism simultaneously calls for American literature and American philosophy in a common summoning and space–time. As this essay argues, Emerson’s invention of a philosophy elaborated from the experience of writing and reading is inextricable from the elevation of the self to the order of a philosophical principle. Ultimately, the performative authority of the self-reliant individual serves as the cornerstone for a nation of free thinking and writing men and women.