ABSTRACTMost of Spinoza’s arguments for God’s existence do not rely on any special feature of God, but instead on merely general features of substance. This raises the following worry: those arguments prove the existence of non-divine substances just as much as they prove God’s existence, and yet there is not enough room in Spinoza’s system for all these substances. I argue that Spinoza attempts to solve this problem by using a principle of plenitude to rule out the existence of other (...) substances and that the principle cannot be derived from the PSR, as many claim.Abbreviation: PSR: Principle of Sufficient Reason. (shrink)

Over the past decades there has been increasing interest in the idea that Heidegger was a “transcendental philosopher” during the late 1920s. Furthermore, a consensus has started to emerge around the idea that Heidegger must be thought of as a transcendental thinker during this time. For the most part this means to first experience how Heidegger's work inherits this term from Kant or Husserl so that one can then experience how Heidegger creatively adapts this inheritance. The aim of this paper (...) is to show that such an approach is unhelpful. The aim of this paper is instead to show that transcendental philosophy bears a wholly renewed meaning in Heidegger's fundamental ontology and that this meaning must be understood in an intrinsic connection with the fundamental-ontological problem of transcendence. Articulating this connection will show how Heidegger makes transcendental philosophy properly phenomenological. Over the past decades there has been increasing interest in the idea that Heidegger was a “transcendental philosopher” during the late 1920s. Furthermore, a consensus has started to emerge around the idea that Heidegger must be thought of as a transcendental thinker during this time. For the most part this means to first experience how Heidegger's work inherits this term from Kant or Husserl so that one can then experience how Heidegger creatively adapts this inheritance. The aim of this paper is to show that such an approach is unhelpful. The aim of this paper is instead to show that transcendental philosophy bears a wholly renewed meaning in Heidegger's fundamental ontology and that this meaning must be understood in an intrinsic connection with the fundamental-ontological problem of transcendence. Articulating this connection will show how Heidegger makes transcendental philosophy properly phenomenological. For a brief time during the late 1920s Heidegger speaks of his philosophical vision in “transcendental” terms; indeed, the title for the whole first part of Being and Time even speaks of winning a specifically “transcendental horizon” for the question of being. Conversely, the past few decades have seen an increasing interest in transcendental philosophy. Indeed, one might even say that there has been a renewed desire for the transcendental – for its rationality, for its metaphysical power and loftiness, for its epistemological armour or for its power to unify traditions – and this desire has lead to all sorts of “transcendental interpretations of … ” Accordingly, while under other circumstances Heidegger's talk of the transcendental might have been brushed under the rug as a “metaphysical” embarrassment it has instead become increasingly commonplace for scholars to thematically engage with this aspect of Heidegger's work. Properly speaking, there is no getting around the way that Heidegger positions his work in transcendental terms during the late 1920s. But language is a mercurial thing; so if there is no getting around the idea that there is something “transcendental” about Heidegger's work from the late 1920s, there is equally no getting around the question concerning the meaning of this ascription. What does it mean to be transcendental? What does it mean for Heidegger to be transcendental? These are questions which remain for us, and how we respond to these questions will have a significant effect on our reading of Heidegger. In fact, as this paper will demonstrate by example, how we respond to these questions has a significant effect on our understanding of the meaning and demands of the “task of thinking” as presented to us by Heidegger's work from the late 1920s. The question about the meaning of the term “transcendental” in Heidegger's late 20s philosophy is both modest and immodest. On the one hand it is a very small topic – perhaps, one might even suspect, a merely pedantic one – but on the other hand it aims at the highest question, namely, the Seinsfrage. In order to investigate these questions I will begin by presenting the most common contemporary interpretations of Heidegger's transcendental philosophising in connection with some reflections on the history of the concept of the transcendental. Secondly, I will demonstrate the formal meaning of the word “transcendental” in Heidegger. Thirdly, working from this foundation I will more fully clarify the meaning of a Heideggerian transcendental philosophy through an investigation of the concepts, problems and phenomena arising from the preceding analysis. Here, in §3, the significance of Heidegger's concept of the “transcendental” is explicitly grappled with. (shrink)

Aesthetics is the part of contemporary academic philosophy that is concerned with art, beauty, criticism, and taste. As such, it must address metaphysical issues, epistemic problems, and questions of value. This makes it difficult to present a coherent account of the subject matter of aesthetics. In this article, I argue that this difficulty is the result of ambiguities and contradictions that arose in disputes about the relationship between the science of aesthetics, the critique of taste, and the philosophy of art (...) in German philosophy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By reconstructing the history of these debates, I hope to shed new light on the origins of aesthetics as a discipline and to explain why its subject matter and status within philosophy are still so difficult to define. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of the mereological thought of the medieval philosopher and theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas. Until the 20th century mereology—the study of the relationship of whole and part—was not generally recognized as a distinct domain of philosophy and so Aquinas, like most of his contemporaries, has no single systematic treatment of it as a topic in its own right. However, a cohesive account of part‐whole relations can be pieced together from the various metaphysical, ethical and theological contexts (...) in which Aquinas deals with mereological issues. In this article, I give an account of both Aquinas's conceptual understanding of composition and his taxonomy of the different kinds of wholes and parts that there are. I end with comments on three marginal cases of mereological relationships in Aquinas's philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Les Cinq Sens (1985) Michel Serres proposes an oblique but suggestive history of the transcendental in Western philosophy. Within this context he also proposes a transformation of the transcendental in order to think the difference between the conditions and the conditioned without resorting to a theological anchor point. In brief, Serres argues that the transcendental is nothing other than local circumstances that (sometimes) coalesce into contingent stabilities. This article will examine both Serres’s proposal for the transcendental as well (...) as the history that leads to it in order to assess the value of Serres’s contribution to the longstanding problem of the transcendental in Western philosophy. The author will argue that in his analysis of the transcendental Serres make a unique and valuable contribution to philosophy. (shrink)