Metaphysical Thinking Research Articles

The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines (review)

The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines (review)

The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines

The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines

The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century Philosophy. By John F. Wippel

The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century Philosophy. By John F. Wippel

Knowing Persons and Knowing God

KNOWING PERSONS AND KNOWING GOD I AM GOING TO propose an account of affirming God's existence which runs counter to a prominent trend in recent philosophy of religion, a trend which defends the meaningfulness of theism by either giving up the concept of God's existence as a category mistake or defining it in terms of the practical value the idea has for religious life. Such defenses are reductionist. They reduce the meaning of ' God exists ' to its functions within what they variously call ' religious language,' the ' religious language game,' or the ' religious form of life.' 1 I, too, want to defend theistic thought and life, but I do not believe that the reductionist defenses work.2 In another paper,3 1 I have in mind especially the following: R. B. Braithwaite, "An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief," The Philosophy of Religion, ed. Basil Mitchell (Oxford, 1971), 72-91. Paul Holmer, "Language and Theology: Some Critical Notes," Harvard Theological Review, LVIII, S (July, 1965), 242-261; "The Nature of Religious Propositions," Religious Language and the Problem of Religious Knowledge, ed. Ronald E. Santoni (Bloomington, 1968); " Wittgenstein and Theology," Refiection, Vol. 65, 4 (1968). Gordon Kaufman, God the Problem (Cambridge, Mass., 1972). See especially chapter 5. D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (London, 1965); Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (New York, 1971). P. F. Schmidt, Religious Knowledge (New York, 1961). Elmer Sprague, Metaphysical Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Paul van Buren, The Edges of Language: An Essay in the Logic of Religion (New York, 1972); "Anselm's Formula and the Logic of God," Religious Studies, vol. 9 (1973), 279-288. 2 Many have said as much, but few have argued the case. Kai Nielsen is a notable exception. See his "Wittgensteinian Fideism," Philosophy, Vol. 42 (1967). More frequently one encounters an off-handed rejection of reductionism, as in Patrick Sherry's Religion, Truth, and Language Games (London, 1977) where he notes that "... it often seems as if Phillips is reducing God to a concept or to some 394 KNOWING PERSONS AND KNOWING GOD 395 I argued that while claiming to leave the practice of theistic religion as it is, reductionist views would, when integrated into believers' lives, lead to so fundamental a change in religious life that instead of defending they would undermine or, as Ninian Smart put it, cause a " colossal revolution " in faith.4 Be that as it may, I also believe that the reductionist defenses of the uses and meaning of religious language do not take their analytic and phenomenological task sufficiently seriously when it comes to the meaning of affirming God's existence. They attend to other functions of religious language without examining the sense affirming God's existence actually has in the practice of theistic faith. They view religions as complex forms of life organized by peculiar language systems, conceptual schemes, or models which perform practical functions for believers. We have learned much from the concern with the uses of religious language, but the question about God's existence persists. In this paper I shall argue that affirming God's existence is a necessary part of theistic religion and that the affirmation follows the logic of the most certain affirmation of existence we make, viz. affirmations of the existence of human individuals or persons. That being so, if it is rational to affirm the existence of persons, it is rational to affirm the existence of God. In order thus to support the rationality of affirming God's existence, I will develop four main theses: (1) that practicing theistic religion presupposes the idea of God as a personal or suprapersonal individual; (2) that the actual practice of theism involves affirming the existence of God in a sense of existence appropriate to such finite individuals as human persons; (3) that affirming the existence of human persons takes place through an act which attributes intentions and values to something encountered in action; (4) that affirming God's existence follows the same logic as affirming the existence of persons. aspect of the world. . . ." (p. 53) . See also Ninian Smart in The Cncept of Worship (New York, 197!'l). 3 "Theistic Reductionism and the...

Heidegger: Il nulla e la fondazione della storicita (review)

372 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Vincenzo Vitiello. Heidegger: II nulla e la fondazione della storicita. Dalla Uberwindung der Metaphysik alla Daseinsanalyse. Urbino: Argalia Editore, 1976. Pp. 495. In a few introductory pages Vitiello explains his approach to Heidegger's philosophy. Nothingness , he asserts, is the abyss of Being from which its "presence" emerges always anew in the "world" of Dasein. Therefore, nothingness rather than Being is the ground of historicity. Since Being and Time is, in the author's opinion, the result of Heidegger's overcoming metaphysics, the meaning of the latter must be dealt with first. Vitiello begins his discussion with the modem age of science and technology, the most powerful expression of metaphysical thinking. Heidegger has coined the term Ge-stell to denote the way man looks at things in a "world" dominated by technology. Dasein (man) measures and calculates objects in order to make use of them as he pleases. But things are not present without the presence of Being; that is, Being reveals beings and things. The modem era is characterized by the fact that Dasein forgets Being, and Being has withdrawn, The forgetfulness of Being, however, has a long history beginning with Plato and leading to Nietzsche. The metaphysical thinkers comprehend Being as a being, an ideal absolute or a highest being--God. Vitiello gives a good account of the metaphysical tradition. His presentation of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzscbe seems to this reviewer most successful. He points to the connection between the Will to Power, the Eternal Recurrence, and the essence of the technological world. In the epoch of the machine Nietzsche's Will to Power is reflected in man's will to dominate nature; the Eternal Recurrence "presences" things in accord with the will that acts upon them. Heidegger's criticism of the metaphysical tradition, however, is not the simple rejection it may appear to be. It was precisely the forgetfulness of Being by the great thinkers of the past that showed Heidegger a new path to Being. In its withdrawal Being has revealed itself. The double movement of Being as unconcealment and withdrawal circumscribes the "world" of Dasein. It is a "world" that defines the epochal events of Being. Because Being conceals as it reveals itself, the truth of any epoch is untruth (lrre) at the same time. This insight, it seems to me, is the focal point of Vitiello's argumentation. It helps him, for example, to give the ontological difference, a key concept for Heidegger, a deeper explanation and meaning. Instead of being satisfied with interpreting the ontological difference in terms of the event (Ereignis), the revealing-concealing of Being, Vitiello gropes more deeply. He takes into account Heidegger's claim to the effect that Being and Nothingness are the same and applies it to the ontological difference. Being as a whole is the abyss, the secret or nothingness that is the other to all that is. When Being reveals itself it negates, as it were, its own nothingness: "A new epoch, a new 'world' . . . are continuously negated," the author asserts, "in the negation of Being through nothingness and of nothingness through Being" (p. 277). From this it follows that the ontological difference names the differing, to wit, how nothingness is transformed within Being. The author distinguishes between "the not of the entity which defines Being from the not of the ontological difference which is the not within nothingness and Being" (p. 244). This reviewer considers the author's ability to make a convincing case for relating the ontological difference to nothingness as one of the most exciting results of his book. It is interesting to note that a chapter on Kant does not appear as part of the metaphysical tradition, but it is inserted in his long analysis of Being and Time. Vitiello's reason is that Heidegger gave a lecture course on Kant in Marburg in 1925-26 at a time when he was working on Being and Time. His interpretation of Kant was not unrelated to some major thoughts he developed in Being and Time. Heidegger focused his attention on Kant's concept of imagination, which played a central role in the first edition of the Critique of...

Metaphysical Thinking.

Metaphysical Thinking.

Godfrey of Fontaines on Intension and Remission of Accidental Forms

GODFREY OF FONTAINES ON INTENSION AND REMISSION OF ACCIDENTAL FORMS Godfrey of Fontaines functioned as a Master in the Theology Faculty at Paris from 1285 until ca. 1303 or 1304.* For him as for many of his contemporaries, the apparent change in intensity of certain accidental forms—qualities such as whiteness or heat or even charity in the soul—posed interesting philosophical questions.2 The issue was frequently raised as to how such qualities could undergo some variation in degree whether by increasing (intension or intensification ) or by decreasing (remission) and still retain their identity. Godfrey and his associates would not allow for intension and remission of substantial forms since this would, in their opinion, entail loss of essential identity on the part of the changing substance. Aristotle's remark that forms may be likened to numbers served as a controlling principle here.3 But thirteenth-century Masters devoted considerable attention to this problem with respect to various kinds of qualities. Often such reflections would occur within a theological discussion concerning the possibility of intension or remission of charity within the human soul. Attempted resolution of this admittedly theological problem would frequently lead to examination of the broader philosophical issues involved in intension and remission of qualities as such. Godfrey himself devoted two extended treatments to this topic, one in his Quodlibet 2, q. 10 of 1286, and another in his Disputed Question 18 which, though more difficult to date precisely, seems to 1 On Godfrey's life and works see Wippel, 7"Ae Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century Philosophy (Washington, D.C. 1981), "Introduction," pp. xv-xxiv. For more general studies of Scholastic theories on intension and remission of forms see P. Duhem, Etudes sur Léonard de Vinci, Ser. 3 (Paris, 1955), pp. 314-46; and especially, A. Maier, Zwei Grundprobleme der scholastischen Naturphilosophie: Das Problem der intensiven Grösse, Die Impetustheorie, 2nd ed. (Rome, 1951), pp. 16-109. * See Maier's introductory remarks, op. cit., pp. 3-5. * See Metaphysics VIII, c. 3 (1043b 36-10443 11). Godfrey of Fontaines on Intension and Remission of Accidental Forms 317 be somewhat later.4 Today, however, one encounters certain difficulties when one attempts to determine Godfrey's personal position with respect to this problem. His two accounts differ in certain details, and one wonders if and to what extent they are consistent with one another. Moreover, the text of Disputed Question 18 as it survives in manuscript appears to be incomplete. This is unfortunate since the full text would surely give a clearer impression as to his thinking on this matter. Finally, a strange theory of intension and remission of forms has been ascribed to him by Walter Burley, Duns Scotus, and other later medieval thinkers. But no one has yet, to my knowledge, found this view explicitly defended in Godfrey's surviving texts. Given these problems, it will be my purpose in the present study to set forth in some detail Godfrey's position as it appears in the two sources mentioned above, to compare these two presentations with one another, and then to attempt to determine whether there is any foundation in his writings for the view attributed to him by Burley and others. In order to establish the proximate context for Godfrey's discussion of this, some background will first be provided. I A. Maier has provided a helpful survey of earlier and of medieval discussions of this issue which need not be reduplicated here. But for our immediate purposes, a few points already made by Maier should be recalled. First of all, as she explains, chapter 8 of Aristotle's Categories was a key text for subsequent consideration of this issue. While the Stagirite does not there offer a metaphysical account of intension and remission of forms, he does raise what was later to become a central issue for medieval thinkers: What is the true subject of such intension or remission? Does it take place in the form or quality itself, 4 On the date of Quodlibet 2 see P. Glorieux, La Littérature quodlibétique de 1260 à 1320, Vol. 1 (Le Saulchoir, Kain, 1925), pp. 150, 152...

Heidegger on the Divine: The Thinker, the Poet and God (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 247 Heidegger on the Divine : The Thinker, the Poet and God. By James L. Perotti. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974. Pp. 134. $7.50) Those familiar with Heidegger will wonder how his infrequent and often oracular observations concerning "the holy," "divinity," "God" and "the gods," could inspire a booklength manuscript. However, this slender volume is even slimmer than it at first appears (perhaps this will help relieve that puzzle). Of 134 pages, 17 are footnotes (generally of the German text), 9 are a bibliography, 3 constitute the index. Of the remaining 105 pages, more than two-thirds "prepare" the topic. What we really have, then, is a rehashing of Heidegger's metahistory of philosophy for the purpose of showing why "after the overcoming of metaphysics, after the abandonment of the god of philosophy, Heidegger's thinking can properly be called god-less" (p. 117). Is it unfair to wonder why one would devote a book to a subject concerning which its author says, with reference to Heidegger's thought: "It is a kind of thinking which makes no claims about the divine and has no desire to speculate about this matter. Another way to characterize this thinking in regard to the divine is to call it a silence, a thinking that makes neither affirmation nor denial about god" (p. 117)? Given Heidegger's studied silence concerning "the divine," what is the book's point? The point and utility of Perotti's book seems to me to consist primarly in collecting Heidegger's scattered remarks concerning the divine and fitting them into a coherent and textually correct frame of reference. His thesis, stripped of nuances, is that Heidegger's putative overcoming of metaphysical thinking and speaking is simultaneously an overcoming of traditional theological ways of thinking and speaking. The god of theology is metaphysical, and "even if theology begins with an experience of its god, it remains metaphysical exactly because of its own metaphysical response to that experience" (p. 64). And of that response the later Heidegger has said: "Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god" (Identity and Difference). After a brief orienting chapter ("The Way of Martin Heidegger"), chapters 2, 3 and 4 place a gloss on Heidegger's familiar attempts first to provide a foundation for metaphysics and then to overcome it altogether. Chapter 5 paraphrases Heidegger's mythical approach to Being, an approach which follows quite naturally from his (to my mind lamentable) abandonment of "representational" (i.e., philosophical) thinking. With the abandonment of discursive speech we are left with poetry. And, again quite naturally, Perotti's penultimate chapter, "The Poet and the Thinker," is really an account of Heidegger on H61derlin. Whatever the strengths of Perotti's~book, its defects far outweigh them, in my opinion. I shall mention only a few here, for reasons of space. First, the scholarship is misleading. Often it is deficient. The early chapters are written as if no one had ever spoken to Heidegger's relation to the tradition. Werner Marx is never mentioned, for example. Taken independently , there are better books readily available for each chapter's theme. I have already mentioned Marx. Beda Allemann is better on Heidegger and H61derlin. He, too, is never mentioned. Considerations of scholarship apart for the moment, there is a second deficiency. Perotti's brief account often fails to explain. It merely paraphrases. The central failure of the book, however, is that it is totally uncritical. This will endear Perotti to Heidegger enthusiasts who imitate the master's "way of thinking" by mindless "explication" and for whom criticism is metaphysical original sin. But for philosophers the sins are oracular pronouncements and revivalist ontologies. One illustration may help. In paraphrasing Heidegger's account (in Logos) of Heraclitus's Fragment 50, Perotti writes: "The usual superficial translations understand little of what is said here; many translators term ambiguous his richness of meaning. A typical translation runs: listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are...

The Religious and Metaphysical Thought of Isaac NewtonThe Religion of Isaac Newton. Frank E. Manuel

College in 1973. They deal with Newton's religious views and are in large measure based upon the Yahuda manuscripts in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, the most important manuscripts on Newton's religious views so far discovered. The first two chapters of the book provide us with a lot of background information on Newton. In the first chapter called His Father in Heaven, we hear about the young Newton, his relation to the Church of England, his interest in the Bible, and the unorthodox religious views of many of his most intimate friends and disciples. Manuel's thesis is that from the beginning to the end of his life, Newton felt a close relationship to God and actually felt he was the one chosen for the unique mission of unveiling operations in the world. The aim is to establish an antimetaphysical bias in Newton. Manuel believes that Newton's God was a personal God, a God of commandments, a master, a father in heaven for whom Newton searched throughout his life since his own natural father had been dead when he was born, as Manuel tries to show in his wellknown psychologizing manner.1 In Manuel's opinion, this understanding of a personal God made Newton critical of all those who conceive God in rationalistic terms, in learned metaphysical assertions and propositions. The second chapter is entitled God's Word and Works. It focuses on the relation between science and religion in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century in England and on the continent. Manuel makes it clear that Newton appears to have adopted a positivistic self-understanding of the sciences by immunizing the sciences from religion, but that he also cast doubt on the positivistic self-understanding of the sciences by viewing the search for scientifically valid knowledge as the search for knowledge of operations in the world, and thus as a form of glorifying God. In addition, Manuel is careful to point out that Newton used the findings of science in his understanding of the Bible and that he was interested in alchemy. But when Manuel discourses on those and other topics, we have the impression that he is somehow putting together what we already know from the contemporary scholarship on Newton.

庭園の構想に関する研究I

The ancient Chinese defines the spirit of zen as the followings; Zen is the name of heart. Thart is the body of Zen.The short sentence of FURI TSUMONJI, KYOGAIBETSUDEN represents also the basic metaphysical thinking of Zen sect, and is svmbolised ollly by a word of MU.It means that the essence of Zen is free or nothing in spirit, but is flexible something like an ecko in the deep valley or a reflected image upon the water.For zen sect gardens, therefore, there are no appreciation rules, and yet no written records about composition of gardens and techniques.The author believes that the zen sect garden is a reflection of human life and its composition represents metaphysical thinking and cosmology rooted in Zen. This is especially true for the ancient notable Zen disciples, in most of cases they were the founders of new temples, that garden is a part of the most ideal demonstration places for their original metaphysics and history of spiritual awakenning through designed forms and ornamentsIt is here that the need for research upon these hypotheses is necessary for knowing true meaning of the garden composition symbolise deeply behind, and for opening up a new method of approaching to study on traditional Japanese garden design.This study, therefore, is designed to clarify the followings;1. to find out the original source of the subject of garden, 2. to identify the main theme of the garden from the source, which is translated into modern language, 3. to analyse the garden composition along the main subject, 4. to conclude the identification by use of plan maps and literary quotations

The Problem of "Die Soziologische Verortung Des Antiken Gnostizismus"

Hans G. Kippenberg's Versuch einer soziologischen Verortung des antiken Gnostizismnus (Numen, XVII, Fasc. 3, December 1970) is one of the most interesting recent contributions to our understanding of Gnosticism and could inaugurate a new chapter in the study of the subject. His argument, however, is open to a number of grave objections which ought to be discussed and cleared up before we can proceed further. I will try to explain the reasons for my doubts one by one. Like almost all sociologies of knowledge, Kippenberg's attempt suffers from a confusion between two entirely different questions. The first is why did certain people at a certain time in a certain place find such and such a doctrine plausible? The second question is why was such and such a doctrine conceived and elaborated? The two questions are distinct and the only factor they have in common is the insight that people conceive certain doctrines and consider them true for reasons other than purely empirical and/or rational ones. Obviously, it is always much easier to answer the first question than to answer the second one; but this is no justification for confusing the two. Kippenberg attempts an explanation why certain people in the eastern margins of the Roman Empire adhered to Gnosticism and considered its teachings plausible. The attempt is based on the assumption that these beliefs were not sincerely held but were an ideology, that is, on the assumption that they were held for reasons other than they were purported to be held. This assumption is not unjustifiable but needs careful examination. But in so far as he seeks to explain why Gnostic teachings were conceived and advocated, even the attempt is open to doubts. His article glosses over the distinction between these two questions. He starts off by invoking Topitsch's theories about the origins of metaphysical thoughts, i.e. he starts by examining the genesis of Gnostic teachings.

Extrapolation when very little is known about the source

Prompted by the inadequacies of the now traditional characterization of chance and uncertainty through the Kolmogorov axioms for probability and the relative frequency interpretation of probability, we propose and examine a nonstatistical approach to extrapolation. The basic problem is the association of a real number y to a sequence of real numbers x in such a manner that the pair ( x , y ) conforms with a set of data sequences D = ( x i , y i ), {iti} = 1, M , our prior knowledge of the data source, and our objectives. Our aim is to so define the activity of extrapolation that we can derive extrapolations with only minimal assumptions about the data source. While we are free to define the human activity of extrapolation to suit ourselves, the data source functions independently of our wishful or metaphysical thinking. The basic principle we adhere to is that the extrapolation of x is a function of only those y i for which x is similar to or close to x i ; extrapolate the output of a system by examination of the outputs of similar systems. This vague sentiment is clarified and formalized through ten axioms and leads to an optimal extrapolation function π *( x ; D ). The performance of π * is then studied, both for very large and very small sample sizes ( M ), when the sequences ( x , y ), ( x i , y i ) are, in fact, independent and identically distributed random vectors.

Hägerström's Philosophy of Law

In what it will be convenient to call “the Scandinavian school”; of jurisprudence, Hagerstrom is clearly the master. But his leadership is of a somewhat special kind. For all that he wrote a large book on Roman law, Hägerström was trained as, and continued to be, a philosopher, not a jurisprudentialist or a sociologist. His essays on law and morals are ancillary to his main purpose: to destroy transcendental metaphysics. The epigraphhe chose tohead his contribution to Die Philosophic der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen was uncom-promising: “Praeterea censeo metaphysicam esse delendam.” If, in his published work, he to so considerable a degree concentrated his attention on ethics and jurisprudence, that is because he took them to be a particularly rich source of metaphysical mystery-mongering. Through a study of men's moral and legal ideas, Hägerström thought he could bring out the sources, the defects—and even, in a way, the strength—of metaphysical thinking.

Existentialism and Metaphysics

There has been for some years a feeling in the philosophical world in this country that we have had enough of the unproductive working of the treadmill of linguistics and of the new logic and that Metaphysics is at least not criminal, and even justifiable; notable justifications of Metaphysics are Professor Emmet's The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking and Professor Barnes” The Philosophical Predicament. But what is Metaphysics about? That, it seems to me, is a question which has to be looked into far more carefully than it has been, before we can think of justifying Metaphysics (or, for that matter, of attacking it). “About the Whole” would appear to be the answer which no would-be metaphysician can avoid, however frightened he may be of being sent into a concentration camp by his Ayerian colleagues for giving it. What is this Whole and how is it to be got? Judging at least by most nineteenth-century metaphysics, it would seem that the Whole is some kind of totality (of all that is known or to be known), comparable, save in respect of comprehensiveness, to the totality say which Physics deals with, and that it is got by reflecting on the nature of any knowing (epistemology) and/or on all the branches of knowledge and their relations to each other; Metaphysics, we should conclude, is a synthesis or construct both crowning, and confirmed by, knowledge.

Plato and the ἈΡΧΗ ΚΑΚѠΝ

Cook Wilson remarks that one of the chief doctrines of the Timaeus ‘relates to the existence of evil … all cosmogonies which attribute the world to some divine activity find a difficulty here. Some assume another spirit, an evil one, though partly subordinate to the good one; others, to avoid making an evil spiritual principle, assume an unintelligent matter, or in general some form of Necessity beside the Good Spirit. We should suppose that Plato, if not monist, would incline to the latter and should have thought he clearly adopted it in the Timaeus.’ In Laws X, ‘soul’ is the cause of evil as of good. So Plato says one thing at one time, another at another. But his interpreters do not like to admit this. Professor Cornford found the spiritual view of evil lurking in the Timaeus too. Mr. Vlastos and lately the Rév. Père Festugière, though they differ about the meaning of Laws X, agree that for Plato the κακοποιόν is always matter. I think that we should not try too hard to smooth over the discrepancies in what Plato says about evil. They call attention to something obscure, perhaps incoherent, in his metaphysical thinking.

The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking.

The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking.

The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, by Dorothy M. Emmet. 238 pp. New York, Macmillan and Company, 1946. $3.00

The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, by Dorothy M. Emmet. 238 pp. New York, Macmillan and Company, 1946. $3.00

The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking

The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking

Reviews of Book: The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking

Reviews of Book: The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking

The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking. By Dorothy M. Emmet. (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1945. Pp. xii and 238. Price 10s. 6d.)

The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking. By Dorothy M. Emmet. (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1945. Pp. xii and 238. Price 10s. 6d.)