In my old manuscript “Formal Theology” that now is out as a preprint I show that science and theology can be founded upon the same set of basic assumptions. I now follow up this idea with the thought that Formal Theology may be used to ground also a religion. “Religion“, in this regard, as related to beliefs. I’m not going into any details, neither concerning the original manuscript, nor this new idea. The important thing, I (...) think, is to explore if this kind of “religion”, in any way, can be accommodated with “ordinary” religions. I leave more rigorous work to myself or to others for the future. (shrink)

Ontology and theology cannot be combined if ontology excludes non physical causes. This paper examines some possibilities for ontology to be combined with theology in so far as non physical causes are permitted. The paper builds on metaphysical findings that shows that separate ontological domains can interact causally indirectly via interfaces. As interfaces are not universes a first universe is allowed to be caused by an interface without violating the principle of causal closure of any universe. Formal (...) theology can therefore be based on the assumption that the (first) universe is caused by God if God is defined as the first cause. Given this, formal theology and science can have the same ontological base. (shrink)

This article approaches Judaism through Rabbi Bradley S. Artson’s book, God of Becoming and Relationships: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology. It explores his understanding of how Jewish theology should and does cohere with central features of both process theology and Robert S. Hartman’s formal axiology. These include the axiological/process concept of God, the intrinsic value and valuation of God and unique human beings, and Jewish extrinsic and systemic values, value combinations, and value rankings.

For centuries, various disciplines have tried to tackle the topic of how legitimate it is to use violence in order to solve social problems. One of the most recent interdisciplinary approaches, most successful in present-day Latin America, is the so-called "Ethics of Liberation," designed by Enrique Dussel. Based on the Theology of Liberation, this theory goes beyond the limits of theology as a discipline and pleads for three ethical criteria that every political revolution must fulfill to use violence (...) in a legitimate way. The first is a formal criterion, which basically takes after the ideal dialogue situation endorsed by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and purports to be rooted in yet another discipline, linguistics. The second is a material criterion, defined as the upshot of an acceptable welfare for all citizens, thus intimately linked with the discipline of economics and political philosophy. The third is a criterion of feasibility, which makes a revolt legitimate if, and only if, it has a reasonable possibility of succeeding; hence strategic issues take a leading role. This essay contends that each of these criteria is conceptually incompatible with violence. Hence, Dussel's arguments involve multiple contradictions as he aims to justify the use of violence precisely with these interdisciplinary criteria. (shrink)

The methodological nonreductionism of contemporary biology opens an interesting discussion on the level of ontology and the philosophy of nature. The theory of emergence (EM), and downward causation (DC) in particular, bring a new set of arguments challenging not only methodological, but also ontological and causal reductionism. This argumentation provides a crucial philosophical foundation for the science/theology dialogue. However, a closer examination shows that proponents of EM do not present a unified and consistent definition of DC. Moreover, they find (...) it difficult to prove that higher-order properties can be causally significant without violating the causal laws that operate at lower physical levels. They also face the problem of circularity and incoherence in their explanation. In our article we show that these problems can be overcome only if DC is understood in terms of formal rather than physical (efficient) causality. This breakdown of causal monism in science opens a way to the retrieval of the fourfold Aristotelian notion of causality. (shrink)

For centuries, several disciplines have tried to tackle the topic of how legitimate it is to use violence in order to solve social problems. One of the most recent interdisciplinary approaches (and one of the most successful in present-day Latin America) is the so-called “Ethics of Liberation,” designed by Enrique Dussel. Based on the Theology of Liberation, this theory goes beyond the limits of theology as a discipline and pleads for three ethical criteria that every political revolution must (...) fulfill to use violence in a legitimate way. The first is a formal criterion, which basically takes after the ideal dialogue situation endorsed by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and purports to be rooted in yet another discipline, linguistics. The second is a material criterion, defined as the upshot of an acceptable welfare for all citizens, thus intimately linked with the discipline of economy and political philosophy. The third is a criterion of feasibility, which makes a revolt legitimate if, and only if, it has a reasonable possibility of succeeding; hence strategic issues take a leading role. This essay contends that each of these criteria is conceptually incompatible with violence. Hence, Dussel’s arguments involve multiple contradictions as he aims to justify the use of violence precisely with these interdisciplinary criteria. (shrink)

In the so-called modern age, a transition can be observed in Western thought regarding this issue of tolerance. A perceptible shift can be seen in the understanding of tolerance as mere endurance to attempts to conceive of tolerance as a kind of well-grounded acceptance. It is regrettable, however, that this change in thinking has often remained hypothetical rather than heuristic. This certainly has to do with the fact that most of the time only large-scale theological, philosophical, or political projects were (...) negotiated. In this case, as is often happens, the directly concerned individual, the concrete person in the course of the demonstration efforts, was lost. We want to counter this loss with our study. In our investigation, which is based on a phenomenological reflection, we want to examine tolerance and respect as an existential problem couched within an individual. We wish to consider a person who desires to be tolerant and respectful; a person who accepts tolerance and respect as an existential task. (shrink)

Written over the course of two months in early 2008, Art as "Night" is a series of essays in part inspired by a January 2007 visit to the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, London, with subsequent forays into related themes and art-historical judgments for and against theories of meta-painting. Art as "Night" proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form of formalism, (...) this "night" is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency. Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as "Night" restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in the Baroque era. It is with Velázquez that we see a turning point, an emphasis on the specific resources of painting as a form of speculative intellect, while it is with contemporary works by Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer that we see the return of the same after the collapse of modernism, and after subsequent postmodern maneuvers to make art discursive yet without the austerities of the formal means present in Art as Art. Art as "Night" argues for a nondiscursive form of intellection fully embodied in the work of art – and, foremost, painting. A synoptic and intentionally elusive and allusive survey of painting, through the collapse of the art market in late 2007, Art as "Night" suggests by way of this critique of an elective "night" crossing painting that the art world is an endlessly deferred version of pleroma , a fully synthetic world given to an exploration and appropriation of the given through classical mimesis and epistemology and its complete incorporation and transfiguration in a theory of knowledge and art as pure speculative agency. In effect, Art as "Night" is an incarnational theory of art as absolute knowledge. (shrink)

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. This entry covers epistemology in two parts: one historical, one contemporary. The former provides a brief theological history of epistemology. The latter outlines three categories of contemporary epistemology: traditional epistemology, social epistemology, and formal epistemology, along with corresponding theological questions that arise in each.

The doctrine of the Trinity is central to mainstream Christianity. But insofar as it posits “three persons” (Father, Son and Holy Spirit), who are “one God,” it appears as inconsistent as the claim that 1+1+1=1. -/- Much of the literature on “The Logical Problem of the Trinity,” as this has been called, attacks or defends Trinitarianism with little regard to the fourth century theological controversies and the late Hellenistic and early Medieval philosophical background in which it took shape. I argue (...) that this methodol- ogy, which I call “the Puzzle Approach,” produces obviously invalid arguments, and it is unclear how to repair it without collapsing into my preferred method- ology, “the Historical Approach,” which sees history as essential to the debate. I also discuss “mysterianism,” arguing that, successful or not, it has a different goal from the other approaches. I further argue that any solution from the His- torical Approach satisfies the concerns of the Puzzle Approach and mysterianism anyway. -/- I then examine the solution to the Logical Problem of the Trinity found in St. Gregory of Nyssa’s writings, both due to his place in the history of the doctrine, and his clarity in explicating what I call “the metaphysics of synergy.” I recast his solution in standard predicate logic and provide a formal proof of its consistency. I end by considering the possibilities for attacking the broader philosophical context of his defense and conclude that the prospects for doing so are dim. In any case, if there should turn out to be any problem with the doctrine of the Trinity at all, it will not be one of mere logical inconsistency in saying that “These Three are One.”. (shrink)

Whether Trinitarianism is coherent depends not only on whether some account of the Trinity is coherent, but on which accounts of the Trinity count as "Trinitarian." After all, Arianism and Modalism are both accounts of the Trinity, but neither counts as Trinitarian (which is why defenses of Arianism or Modalism don’t count as defenses of Trinitarianism). This raises the question, if not just any account of the Trinity counts as Trinitarian, which do? Dale Tuggy is one of very few philosophers (...) to give explicit definitions of Trinitarian (versus Unitarian) theology. But they are no mere formalities. They are essential to his central criticisms of both historical and contemporary forms of Trinitarianism. In this paper, I offer my own definitions of Trinitarian and Unitarian theology, contrast them with Tuggy’s, and argue for the superiority of my definitions to Tuggy’s. If Trinitarianism and Unitarianism are what Tuggy says they are, the outlook for Trinitarianism is bleak indeed. If they are what I say they are, Tuggy’s central objection to Trinitarianism fails. To show what is at stake in these pairs of definitions, I examine a doctrine much neglected in Analytic Theology, but central to Nicene Trinitarianism—the Monarchy of the Father. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger devotes extensive discussion to medieval philosophers, particularly to their treatment of Truth and Being. On both these topics, Heidegger accuses them of forgetting the question of Being and of being responsible for subjugating truth to the modern crusade for certainty: ‘truth is denied its own mode of being’ and is subordinated ‘to an intellect that judges correctly’. Though there are some studies that discuss Heidegger’s debt to and criticism of medieval thought, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas, there is (...) no constructive reply to his assertions. As a result, Heidegger’s critique had an unprecedented effect on the credibility of medieval philosophy, whereby great portions of the philosophical community dismiss it altogether as an illegitimate Onto‐Theology. It is the aim of this study to offer a constructive reply that will fundamentally grapple with these allegations. By constructive reply we mean not only a reply that avoids the problems Heidegger raises regarding existence, essence and truth, but more importantly, one that uses Heidegger’s criticism in order to present a more insightful account of these notions. The present study is composed of two parts where the second serves as a sort of addendum. The first part, the core of this study, is an attempt to develop an understanding of the distinction between essence and existence that, on the one hand, accords with Heidegger’s criticism while on the other hand advances our understanding of how we think and understand reality. After presenting Heidegger’s depiction of Aquinas’s distinction between essence and existence (esse) as a real distinction, the study will present several views propounded by scholars of Aquinas regarding the status of this distinction. It will be argued that it is not clear whether the distinction is real, formal or conceptual, and that different types of distinction are applied in different places, particularly in regard to the phantasm that Aquinas considers essential to the human act of thinking. The second part diverges from the first part and focuses on Heidegger’s criticism of Aquinas’s conception of truth as adequation, i.e., what it is that grounds the possibility of truth as adequation. This divergence is necessary in order to present a full metaphysical response to Heidegger’s criticism. Since the aim of the present study is to argue that Aquinas’s philosophical system can contend with Heidegger’s criticism, a partial reply would greatly diminish its effectiveness. (shrink)

Edward Nieznanski developed in 2007 and 2008 two different systems in formal logic which deal with the problem of evil. Particularly, his aim is to refute a version of the logical problem of evil associated with a form of religious determinism. In this paper, we revisit his first system to give a more suitable form to it, reformulating it in first-order modal logic. The new resulting system, called N1, has much of the original basic structure, and many axioms, definitions, (...) and theorems still remain; however, some new results are obtained. If the conclusions attained are correct and true, then N1 solves the problem of evil through the refutation of a version of religious determinism, showing that the attributes of God in Classical Theism, namely, those of omniscience, omnipotence, infallibility, and omnibenevolence, when adequately formalized, are consistent with the existence of evil in the world. We consider that N1 is a good example of how formal systems can be applied in solving interesting philosophical issues, particularly in Philosophy of Religion and Analytic Theology, establishing bridges between such disciplines. (shrink)

Theology used to be the discipline that arbitrated and ‘said’ the truth. Some argued that its methodical engagement had to make it a search-driven experimentation with an inductive outlook intended at tracking truth through practice and praise, in short conversion. The empirico-formal sciences have sought canonical norms of knowledge away from any regimentation. Neopositivism had for a time entertained a fact-derived language and, as such, it banned metaphor as mingling problems by perpetuating the belief in entirely theoretical knowledge-terms. (...) Here we aim at putting together an examination of some of the reasons why a pluralistic epistemology has come to be adopted, and an attempt at finding pluralistic responses to that very idea through interdisciplinary comparison. This is the editors' (M. Fuller & A. Runehov) introduction: Philippe Gagnon asks the interesting question: Does pluralism itself need to be plural? He argues that neo-positivism has for some time now focused on using a fact-derived language, banning metaphoricity. He explores the reasons pluralistic epistemology came to be adopted, and leads us through some important philosophical problems and how they were tackled by different philosophers and in various times. Such philosophical problems or questions concern theories, truth and knowledge. If a theory is considered to be the best one, on which criteria is this judgement made? Might it be better to have several theories that are ex æquo? Gagnon argues that even though ‘pluralism’ is a better term compared to ‘the many’, it does not entirely escape relativism. Hence, he proposes to use ‘plurality’ instead, which does not threaten the unity of truth. After this philosophical exploration, he turns to theology, specifically Trinitarian theology, to implement his findings there. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the question of whether metaphysics and theology are or can become science. After examining the qualities of contemporary science, which evolved from an earlier historic concept of any body of literature into a formal method for obtaining empirical knowledge, I apply that standard to metaphysics and theology. I argue that neither metaphysics nor theology practices a scientific method or generates scientific knowledge. Worse, I conclude that both metaphysics and theology are (...) at best purely cultural projects—exercises in exegesis of local cultural and religious ideas and language—and, therefore, that other cultures have produced or would produce radically different schemes of metaphysics or theology. At its worst, metaphysics is speculation about the unknowable, while theology is rumination about the imaginary. (shrink)

"Time. Perception. Imagination. Phenomenological Studies on the Question of Time by Augustine, Kant and Husserl". (rus), SPb, 2013. Summary: The monograph is devoted to the key elements of the philosophy of time which determine the necessity of historicism in the analysis of subjectivity. The main idea which defined the composition and design of this work is to trace how the Kantian definition of time as the “form of inner sense” is revealed in Husserl’s phenomenology. The original intention was to understand (...) all three components of this definition. Firstly, what is the inner form, in terms of phenomenology, what are the principles of its constitution and how one can talk about the property of formation? Secondly, what is the meaning of the term "inner" in philosophy, where the division into internal and external has always been a formality, not affecting the essence of things? And finally, what sort of “sensibility” is assumed in transcendental science, bound to become the basis of understanding the history and culture. Presumably, these three Kantian concepts constituted the original plan to analyze the nature of cognitive capabilities of the subject, claiming the gnoseological stage on which the philosophy of time is unfolded. In other words, this work deals with the historical and philosophical analysis of the phenomenological principles by which the concept of time as developed in the twentieth century emerged in the framework of phenomenology. The analyze of the structure of the subject assumes that time, perception and imagination combine in a special type of inner synthesis, which may not be relevant to certain aspects of the method but maintain the basis for a kind of anthropology of time, in continuation of the traditional “inner” contemplation. I consider the inner structure of time with the account of philosophy of St. Augustine, who in many respects not only anticipated the conclusions of phenomenology, but also in his reflections encompassed deeper layers of inner experience. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of St. Augustine, in which the theory of time is analyzed in conjunction with the doctrine of “inner word”, specifics of memory representations and notion of inner sense. Additionally, I consider St. Augustine’s reflections about numbers that constitute the basis of aesthetic perception of music (De Musica). Thus, the philosophy of St. Augustine already covers the whole spectrum of anthropology of time, including the question of relation between time and eternity, which remains practically unexplored in phenomenology and serves as the proof of that in interactions between philosophy and theology the tradition remains important. The second chapter of this study is devoted to analysis of the transcendental aesthetic of Kant, which includes all the methodological possibilities of considering the category of time as a formal condition for any experience, consequentially serving as a foundation for further logical development by Husserl, which includes the critical disengagement of the founder of phenomenology from Kant's transcendentalism. Particular attention is paid to the origin of the concept of inner sense, as well as possible interpretations of the function of imagination, which as a transcendental ability remains the most interesting type of synthesis. Handwritten fragments of Kant’s works are also of interest to the character of the imagery as considered in detail by Husserl. Chapter three discusses the phenomenology of inner time consciousness, represented in those important aspects, without which it is impossible to speak about the internal structure of temporal experience - the subjectivity of time, retention, "living present", and the character of synthesis. Particular attention is paid to Husserl's polemics with those representatives of psychological branch in the studies of consciousness, whose ideas greatly influenced the very motivation for creating the method. Apart from the well-known criticism of Brentano, the third chapter highlights the rarely analyzed psychological ideas that motivated the choice of Husserl’s terminology - the "Präsenzzeit” by W. Stern, the "psychological analysis" by A. Meinong, and the “fusion” (Verschmelzung) by K. Stumpf. Chapter four deals with the need to analyze the specifics of image as an element of consciousness and imagery as such, which includes a system of objectified acts. Thus is revealed the very nature of synthetic connections in the acts of consciousness, as well as the presumably imaginative character of the constitution of temporal form. (shrink)

The theology of the St. John’s Letters forms a kind of synthesis of the Pauline and Petrine elements, so that the earthly and prophetic-heavenly tradition and the contemplative vision unite at the same point. Although it does not have all the elements of a classical epistle, 1 John has all the details of a pastoral letter, rather in a contemporary sense. The document as a whole presents the fluidity of a homily, an “Epistle-essay”, which, however, addresses issues specific to (...) its readers. On the other hand, 2 John and 3 John are writings that fall into the epistolary genre of the Hellenistic period, with a strong personal character, being extremely short (13 and 15 verses), even the smallest literary productions within the New Testament canon. If the first Epistle was written in order to defend the authentic interpretation of the Johannine tradition, with a substantial theological argument, the last two letters address an ecclesial issue, resorting to formal and institutional arguments. (shrink)

This study critically explores, in the light of Christian theology, the singular inter- pretation that François Laruelle (1937) makes of the figure of Christ and his relation- ship with human being. First, we approach the way in which Laruelle’s Christology challenges the abidance between the apostolic narrative and the believing compre- hension about the unity between the Mystery of God and the Event of Jesus Christ. According to Laruelle, Christ has not only raised human freedom beyond the essence and (...) existence of an absolute (and, therefore, the founding axioms of Philosophy that require a prior foundation of the founded); but Christ exhibits the absolute in his finite existence as fully actual. Second, even briefly, we will trace the theological-anthro- pological physiognomy of the Mystery of the Incarnation by means of an inquiry in its soteriological sense. In that sense, the first formal Christian theology is precious: the theology of the Fathers of the Church. So, we intend to point to the way in which Christian faith contributes to the clarification of the singular super-natural quality that defines human nature in its divine connaturality: possibility of always being more and better in the world. (shrink)

Formal clinical trials of pig-to-human organ transplant—known as xenotransplantation—may begin this decade, with the first trials likely to consist of either adult renal transplants or pediatric cardiac transplant patients. Xenotransplantation as a systematic scientific study only reaches back to the latter half of the 20th century, with episodic xenotransplantation events occurring prior to that. As the science of xenotransplantation has progressed in the 20th and 21st centuries, the public's knowledge of the potential therapy has also increased. With this, there (...) have been shifting ethical stances toward xenotransplantation in key areas, such as religious and public viewpoints towards xenotransplantation, animal rights, and public health concerns. This review provides a historical–ethical account of xenotransplantation and details if or how viewpoints have shifted over time. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that no strong doctrine of the Fall can undermine the propriety of epistemic self-trust. My argument proceeds by introducing a common type of philosophical methodology, known as reflective equilibrium. After a brief exposition of the method, I introduce a puzzle for someone engaged in the project of self-reflection after gaining a reason to distrust their epistemic selves on the basis of a construal of a doctrine of the Fall. I close by introducing the worry as (...) a formal argument and demonstrate the self-undermining nature of such an argument. (shrink)

Affirming that divine knowledge of occurrent changes among particulars is incompatible with the doctrine of divine immutability, this article seeks to resolve this tension by denying the latter. Reviewing this long-running debate, I first formalize the exchange between al-Ghazālı̄and Avicenna on this topic, and then set out the ways in which contemporary Sadrāean philosophers have tried to resolve the incompatibility. I argue that none of the cited Sadrāean attempts to resolve the incompatibility between divine omniscience and immutability is successful. Then, (...) by reference to certain principles drawn from Shia theology, I indicate how one might seek to reject the dogma of divine immutability. I conclude that by emancipating ourselves from that dogma, new horizons could be opened for Islamic philosophy, free from traditional Hellenistic constraints. (shrink)

This article argues that actual entities come first; the statistical laws of nature are their effects, not their causes. Statistical laws are mentally abstracted from their habits and are only formal, not efficient, causes. They do not make anything happen or prevent anything from happening. They evolve or change as the habits of novel creatures evolve or change. They do not control or inform us about what any individual entity is doing, only about what masses of individuals on average (...) are doing. Thus, there is no way that traditional divine miracles could “violate” them. God has sufficient efficient-causal power to create our world ex nihilo, as in the Big Bang, and to prevent evils, which God does not do from love, justice, and moral goodness. Seven elements of a viable theodicy are outlined, the most important of which is divine justice. It would be unjust for God to prevent harms in some cases but not in all. In a universe in which God prevents all evils and thus directly controls everything, no creatures would take any responsibility for what they do. A loving and just God voluntarily and consistently limits the exercise of divine power so we can be free, responsible, and creative. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

There has been a tendency in some of the most influential recent interpretations of Hegel to downplay the theological characterizations that Hegel gives to the subject-matter of logic, and to emphasize, instead, certain continuities taken to exist between Hegel’s conception of logic and that of Kant. In the work of Robert Pippin and others, this has led to an ‘apperception’-oriented interpretation of Hegel’s logic, according to which Hegel follows Kant in taking logic to be primarily concerned with the nature of (...) human self-conscious subjectivity. Here I put pressure on this interpretation—first, by foregrounding textual and systematic evidence for taking the theological characterizations to accurately convey Hegel’s considered position on logic, as the science of the ‘absolute idea’, and then, secondly, by showing how Hegel’s arguments for the absolute formality and universality of logic point instead to a more fully-fledged rejection of Kant’s conception as too specifically psychological. (shrink)

Can Hegel, a philosopher who claims that philosophy lsquo;has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theologyrsquo;, ever be taken as anything emother than/em a religious philosopher with little to say to any philosophical project that identifies itself as emsecular/em?nbsp; If the valuable substantive insights found in the detail of Hegelrsquo;s philosophy are to be rescued for a secular philosophy, then, it is commonly presupposed, some type of global reinterpretation of the enframing idealistic framework is required. In (...) this essay, this assumption is challenged. br /br /Kantrsquo;s interpretation of space and time as a response to Newtonrsquo;s theologically based spatio-temporal emrealism/em is taken as a model of what it is to be a Kantian emidealist/em about God and the self. In turn, Hegelrsquo;s philosophy is taken as a development of this approach that overcomes the limitations of Kantrsquo;s formal approach. Hegelrsquo;s major contribution to Kantrsquo;s revolutionary transformation of the task of philosophy is, it is argued, his recognitive conception of lsquo;spiritrsquo;. While this has been widely appreciated with regard to the relations between lsquo;subjectiversquo; and lsquo;objectiversquo; spirit, it is suggested that a fuller understanding of the nature of Hegelrsquo;s emabsolute/em idealism requires a proper understanding of how this approach also applies to the domain of lsquo;absolute spiritrsquo;. br /br /. (shrink)

A theistic science would have to represent the integration of all kinds of knowledge intent on explaining the whole of reality. These would include, at least, history, metaphysics, theology, formal logic, mathematics, and experimental sciences. However, what is the whole of reality that one wants to explain? :.

The problems with grace and free will have prompted long-standing theological conflicts, chiefly revolving around certain disagreements over the nature of divine causality in respect to the free will's of creatures and His foreknowledge of free acts. Eleonore Stump offers a new interpretation of divine action on the will that holds God only acts by way of formal causality and that human cooperation with grace is only by way of "quiescence." I argue that this account lacks coherence in certain (...) important respects, especially in how human beings freely decide upon conversion - a process impossible on this model. I also argue that any model of divine causality cannot escape the dichotomy of holding a Molinist or a Banezian model of efficacious grace. In response, I offer a new interpretation of classical Thomist models of grace that preserves human freedom and divine sovereignty in grace. (shrink)

This article explores aspects of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption from the perspective of systems theory. Mosès, Pollock, and others have noted the systematic character of the Star. While “systematic” does not mean “systems theoretic,” the philosophical theology of the Star encompasses ideas that are salient in systems theory. The Magen David star to which the title refers, and which deeply structures Rosenzweig’s thought, fits the classic definition of “system” – a set of elements (God, World, Human) and relations between (...) the elements (Creation, Revelation, Redemption). The Yes and No of the elements and their reversals illustrate the bridging of element and relation with the third category of “attribute,” a notion also central to the definition of “system.” In the diachronics of “the All,” the relations actualize what is only potential in the elements in their primordial state and thus remedy the incompleteness of these elements, fusing them into an integrated whole. Incompleteness is a major theme of systems theory, which also explicitly examines the relations between wholes and parts and offers a formal framework for expressing such fusions. In this article, the systems character of Parts I & II of the Star is explored through extensive use of diagrams; a systems exploration of Part III is left for future work. Remarkably, given its highly architectonic character, diagrams are absent in Rosenzweig’s book, except for the triangle of elements, the triangle of relations, and the hexadic star, which are presented on the opening page of each part of the book. While structures can be explicated entirely in words, diagrams are a visual medium of communication that supplements words and supports a nonverbal understanding that structures both thought and experience. (shrink)

In this study, I intend to show how and why, in the Port-Royal Logic, a singular term can reveal the nature of the logical judgment in the handbook. As I argue, the treatment given to one of thee singular terms, namely, the defined descriptions, in the terminology introduced by Russell, leads to an opening to langage that sounds unexpected and unjustified. Considering the privilege of thinking over langage and also that judgment is the mental act that defines logic, however, we (...) may understand how the authors regard langage, in relation to the epistemic constituents, namely, the mental acts within the terms. In doing so we are compelled to recognize the implications of this step towards pragmatism in fixing the meaning of defined descriptions to the nature of judgment in the handbook. This opening to langage reveals the conception of judgment as a twofold mental act: a formal and a practical (moral and theological) one. (shrink)

William Oliver Martin published "The Order and Integration of Knowledge" in 1957 to address the problem of the nature and the order of various kinds of knowledge; in particular, the theoretical problem of how one kind of knowledge is related to another kind. Martin characterizes kinds of knowledge as being either autonomous or synthetic. The latter are reducible to two or more of the autonomous (or irreducible) kinds of knowledge, viz., history (H), metaphysics (Meta), theology (T), formal logic (...) (FL), mathematics (Math), and generalizations of experimental science (G). Metaphysics and theology constitute the two domains of the ontological context while history and experimental science are the two domains of the phenomenological context. The relation of one kind of knowledge to another may be instrumental, constitutive, and/or regulative. For instance, historical propositions are constitutive of G, metaphysical propositions are regulative of G, and propositions in formal logic and mathematics are instrumental to G. Theological propositions are not related to G and so there is no conflict between science and theology. Martin's work sheds light on the possible areas of incompatibility between science and religion. (shrink)

Although there has been little written to date that speaks directly to problems of religious luck, described in other terms these problems have a long history. Contemporary contributors to the literature have referred to “soteriological luck” (Anderson 2011) “salvific luck” (Davidson 1999) and “religious luck” (Zagzebski 1994). Using “religious” as the unifying term, Part I of this monograph begins with the need a more comprehensive taxonomy. Serious philosophic interest in moral and epistemic luck took hold only after comprehensive taxonomies for (...) those kinds of luck were introduced, but this has not yet been done for religious luck. Even if incomplete, the more comprehensive taxonomy, as introduced in Chapter One enables better diagnostic questions to be raised for researchers. Emerging questions about potentially ‘luck leaning’ attributions of good/bad religious luck, and of the possibility and desirability of “luck free theologies,” are questions which I hope to motivate as of central interest to researchers in philosophy of religion, both secular and religious. The taxonomy highlights why we should take two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — to be inextricably connected. The connection between attributing good/bad luck and violating inductive norms is easy to see upon reflection. One related distinction common in recent work on epistemic luck is that between benign evidential luck (‘benign’ because consistent with justified belief and knowledge), and malign (positive epistemic status undercutting) veritic luck. How, philosophically, this distinction should be understood is an especially acute problem when it comes to testimonial trust, and to intellectually virtuous or vicious ways of assessing testimonial claims, and sources of claims. So the chapter concludes with development of the case of Tess, as an example of testimonial environmental veritic luck. The Tess case is constructed to be formally analogous to the environmental veritic luck operating in fake barn cases (where visual perception rather than reception of testimony is the source of the agent’s belief). There does seem to be an intrinsic connection between epistemic assessment of the agent’s beliefs and the inductive context in which their own and their religious community’s inquiry takes place. This will allow for some potentially powerful thought experiments in successive chapters, about luck, risk, and questions of epistemic in/justice as they pertain to religious faith ventures. (shrink)

This chapter sharpens the book’s criticism of exclusivist responsible to religious multiplicity, firstly through close critical attention to arguments which religious exclusivists provide, and secondly through the introduction of several new, formal arguments / dilemmas. Self-described ‘post-liberals’ like Paul Griffiths bid philosophers to accept exclusivist attitudes and beliefs as just one among other aspects of religious identity. They bid us to normalize the discourse Griffiths refers to as “polemical apologetics,” and to view its acceptance as the only viable form (...) of pluralism. This reasoning may seem initially plausible, but on closer examination his and other’s defence of the reasonableness of exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity fall apart. Informed by our study of luck-leaning theological explanations of religious difference and the counter-inductive thinking they exemplify, I argue that exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity are best explained by personal and group bias, and that a discourse between exclusivist authors or sects is beyond the pale of reasonable disagreement. Our study of descriptive (psychological) and prescriptive (religious) fideism in the first sections of Chapter Five suggests that we turn back to formal features of doxastic methods (i.e., of how people process), features that may be straightforwardly tested for in studies utilizing scales of religious orientation. These formal features allow us to better recognize not only the multiplicity of models of faith that religious adherents adhere to, but also that the relationship between forms of fideism is scalar: there is a spectrum of views running from rationalism to fideism, and at the fideistic end from moderate to strong forms of religious fideism. I further explain why developing tests and markers for a high degree of fideistic orientation is important to all those who study religion. The second half of the chapter turns to criticism or censure of exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, in contrast to apologetic defenses of exclusivism. While we have examined the close connections between fideism and fundamentalism, and again between fundamentalism and exclusivism in earlier chapters, a sharper focus reveals an important but little-recognized distinction reflected in the literature: the distinction between religion-specific (or particularist) and mutualist exclusivism. The mutualist doesn’t talk just about the right of adherents of one specific religion to assert exclusivism, but the adherents of any and all “home” religions. I argue that some previously unrecognized problems for the reasonableness of exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity are brought to light when we make the distinction between the two basic ways to understand the claim that exclusivists are making. I put particularist (Barth, Lindbeck, Plantinga) and mutualist (Griffiths, Gellman, Margalit, D’Costa) defenses of exclusivism on the horns of a dilemma, and argue that despite the popularity it presently enjoys among post-liberal theologians, a close examination reveals that the very conceptual coherence of mutualist exclusivism is in serious doubt. (shrink)

Measures of inductive risk and of safety-principle violation help us to operationalize concerns about theological assertions or a sort which, as we saw in Part I, aggravate or intensify problems of religious luck. Our overall focus in Part II will remain on a) responses to religious multiplicity, and b) sharply asymmetrical religious trait-ascriptions to religious insiders and outsiders. But in Part II formal markers of inductive norm violation will supply an empirically-based manner of distinguishing strong from moderate fideism. As (...) we develop these markers we will elaborate their more specific connections with comparative study of religious fundamentalisms (chapters 3 and 4), with exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity (chapter 5), and with working hypotheses in cognitive science of religion (chapter 6). In Chapters 3 the special focus is on the need for comparative fundamentalism (hereafter CF), and on how a better inductive risk ‘toolkit’ can empower its development. The “Enemy in the Mirror” is a metaphor which researchers of CF have sometimes used to describe a phenomena of special concern. This allows that religious fundamentalism per se need not be morally or socially problem, and that the terms such as “fundamentalism” and “fideism should not be over-used by scholars. But the enemy-in-the-mirror phenomena, which gives rise to what I term “bias-mirroring” attributions of good/bad traits to religious insiders and outsiders, carries enormous moral risks. I argue that this is something researchers would do well to study. On the view to be developed, the enemy in the mirror phenomenon is a direct consequent of counter-inductive thinking when applied to a multiplicity of narrative testimonial traditions. (shrink)

Continuing the systematic henadological interpretation of Proclus' Platonic Theology begun in "The Intelligible Gods in the Platonic Theology of Proclus" (Methexis 21, 2008, pp. 131-143), the present article treats of the basic characteristics of intelligible-intellective (or noetico-noeric) multiplicity and its roots in henadic individuality. Intelligible-intellective multiplicity (the hypostasis of Life) is at once a universal organization of Being in its own right, and also transitional between the polycentric henadic manifold, in which each individual is immediately productive of absolute (...) Being, and the formal intellective organization, which is monocentrically and diacritically disposed. Intelligible-intellective multiplicity is generated from the dyadic relationship of henads to their power(s), the phase of henadic individuality expressed in the second intelligible triad, and is mediated, unlike the polycentric manifold, but not by identity and difference, like the intellective organization. Instead, the hypostasis of Life is constituted by ideal motility and spatiality, figural dispositions, and the intersubjective relations depicted in the divine symposium of Plato's Phaedrus. (shrink)

This dissertation seeks to demonstrate that Proclus articulates a metaphysics not merely compatible with his polytheism, but to which in fact polytheism is integral. For Proclus the One Itself, which according to the First Hypothesis of the Parmenides neither is, nor is one, is instead as each henad, that is, as each God. The henads or Gods thus form a multiplicity unlike any other. Ontic multiplicities always exhibit mediation, in accord with a logic subordinating the many to the one. Correlatively, (...) ontic unity is formal unity, structured by a logic of wholes and parts. These are the dominant characteristics of the realm of Being. The huperousios, or "supra-essential" domain of the Gods, by contrast, is that of a multiplicity of absolute individuals with no totalizing principle over them and no reciprocal relations between them, insofar as either of these would diminish that quality which they pre-eminently possess, namely unity. The supreme form of unity in Proclus' universe, therefore, is the individuality possessed by each absolutely unique God. Chapters 1--4 are concerned with elucidating the nature of the Gods as such. ;The last three chapters provide a close reading of the third, fourth and fifth books of Proclus' Platonic Theology, which I read as an account of the emergence of ontic unity out of henadic unity through the Gods' progressive self-diremption by which a space of mediation is constituted through which they come ultimately to be conceivable as a multiplicity like any other. The key stages in this process are the ontic hypostases of Being, Life and Intellect. The first represents the analysis of the "elements" of each God as such; the second represents the positing of the Gods in co-emergent groupings or pantheons; the third the emergence of fully reciprocal relations in the actions of mythic narrative. At the end of this cosmogonic process, the basic intellectual structures have been constituted which allow the formulation of the philosophical system. The relationship between the Gods and Being is thus embodied in that between myth and dialectic, theology and philosophy. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the Christian and Humanitarian foundation of BOSCO-Uganda, an international community centered around dignified globalization of Northern Uganda. BOSCO, recipient of the Breaking Borders Award in Technology from Google and Global Voices in 2010, provides off-grid solar, computing, and associated training in over 50 sites scattered across half a dozen districts in the North. Formally an arm of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Gulu, BOSCO unites Christian and secular efforts harmoniously. The main burden of this essay (...) is to present a dialectic overview of an account of Christianity and a theology of collaboration that explains its success in achieving that harmony. (shrink)

Triadic (systemical) logic can provide an interpretive paradigm for understanding how quantum indeterminacy is a consequence of the formal nature of light in relativity theory. This interpretive paradigm is coherent and constitutionally open to ethical and theological interests. -/- In this statement: -/- (1) Triadic logic refers to a formal pattern that describes systemic (collaborative) processes involving signs that mediate between interiority (individuation) and exteriority (generalized worldview or Umwelt). It is also called systemical logic or the logic of (...) relatives. The term "triadic logic" emphasizes that this logic involves mediation of dualities through an irreducibly triadic formalism. The term "systemical logic" emphasizes that this logic applies to systems in contrast to traditional binary logic which applies to classes. The term "logic of relatives" emphasizes that this logic is background independent (in the sense discussed by Smolin ). -/- (2) An interpretive paradigm refers to a way of thinking that generates an understanding through concepts, their inter-relationships and their connections with experience. -/- (3) Coherence refers to holistic integrity or continuity in the meaning of concepts that form an interpretation or understanding. -/- (4) Constitutionally open refers to an inherent dependence in principle of an interpretation or understanding on something outside of a specific discipline's discourse or domain of inquiry (epistemic system). Interpretations that are constitutionally open are incomplete in themselves and open to responsive, interdisciplinary discourse and collaborative learning. (shrink)

The 14th-century Dominican theologian and philosopher Durand of Saint-Pourçain was among the intellectuals who took part in the medieval debate on virginity, especially on the relationship between virginity and marriage. This paper discusses a question of his Sentences Commentary (Super Sent., II, d. 20, q. 2), in which Durand poses the question of “whether or not there would have been a loss of virginity in marriage” (utrum in actu matrimoniali fuisset amissio virginitatis) both in statu innocentiae and in statu post (...) peccatum. This paper shows how Durand’s solution to the problem is in opposition to Augustine’s and Thomas Aquinas’s views, based on formal and material aspects of virginity. (shrink)

Abstract The present paper examines the role of epistemic virtues in the formation of intellectual identity and its impact on improving our truth-seeking behaviors. A epistemic virtue is a special faculty or trait of a person whose operation makes that person a thinker, believer, learner, scholar, knower, cognizer, perceiver, etc., or causes his intellectual development and perfection, and improves his truth-seeking and knowledge-acquiring behaviours and places him on the path to attain understanding, perception and wisdom. Virtue epistemology is a set (...) of approaches in contemporary epistemology that regards knowledge as "a true belief arising from humans epistemic virtues." Virtue responsibilism and Virtue reliabilism are two important approaches to virtue epistemology that differ together in their attitude to the nature of epistemic virtue. Responsibilisms regards epistemic virtues as an acquired character traits that must be attained through practice and training with plenty of effort from the agent who possesses the will. In contrast, virtue reliabilisms considers epistemic virtues as reliable and innate cognitive faculties, and believes that this natural faculties has been placed in the human being from the very beginning and, if used in the appropriate condition and in a proper environment, is reliably truth-conducive. So virtue epistemology, which is distinguished from belief-based analytical epistemology by focusing on the cognitive character of the agent rather than the belief, regards epistemic virtues as the constructive factor of the epistemic agent and the condition of reaching the truth. From the two approaches of virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism, this paper focuses on the second approach and with using of the nine-fold virtues, that Jason Baehr posed, shows how to make epistemically good and thinker human by utilizing these virtues and avoiding the corresponding vices and through this, gained the truth in various epistemic areas. After explaining these virtues and their role in the two mentioned domains based on the virtue epistemology, the significance of this relationship in the view of Mulla Sadra as an example of Islamic philosophy is examined, For the reason that he sees knowledge as the produce of some factors that epistemic virtues is considered part of them. In the view of Sadra, epistemic virtues is the specific attributes and traits of reason faculty that their function causes man to be a very good and strong perciever, and their actual possesion or their gradual acquisition leads to the perfection of the soul and the dignity of human existence. In a new theory of soul-  Ph.D. Student of Islamic Philosophy and Theology, Qom University, Qom, Iran (Responsible author) [email protected]  Associate Professor of Islamic Philosophy and Theology, Qom University, Qom, Iran. [email protected]  Professor of Islamic Philosophy and Theology, Qom University, Qom, Iran. [email protected] 2/ Comparative Theology, Vol: 9, No: 19, Spring & Summer 2018 knowledge, he considers the journey of the soul from the outset as evolutionary journey, and, on the other hand, he considers all human activities directly as an activity of the soul (epistemic agent), which he performs through his own faculties. As a result, the soul is a increasing and evolving being, while at the same time acquiring knowledge is also from its own activities, and therefore the factors that make up the soul are also influential in its products. Now, as knowledge comes from soul exposure to the outside world, the more this soul is refined from pollutions and adorned to virtues, the better reflection from reality will be. Undoubtedly, the desire to engage in the process of truth-seeking and the responsible use of cognitive virtues and skills lead man to a desirable goal (recognition of truth) and forms his true intellectual identity. In the end, the paper suggests that because of the importance of epistemic virtues in the improvement of truth-seeking behaviors, educating and cultivating of these types of virtues should be part of the spoken and written course content of universities and schools, and must be proper critical thinking is institutionalized and strengthened in the spirit of community members. Educational resources contain a wide range of information that can deeply influence our epistemic behaviors and actions. Hence, it is necessary to include praised cognitive skills and epistemic virtues training in them. Teachers play an important role in educating and developing epistemic virtues as part of the formal curriculum content of educational centers, perhaps as part of critical thinking and logic courses. The formal education of epistemic virtues and the creation of opportunities for practicing and exercising them will be a good starting point for institutionalizing and developing admired cognitive skills among members of the community. In a society where individuals in their epistemic processes use their own cognitive virtues and organize their beliefs on their basis, the community itself and the social relations will also be virtuous, because the necessity of such an virtues is that individuals interact with their peers and In these interactions, rule virtue. Observing fairness towards others, intellectual humility, intellectual generosity, courage against miscreant and one who has weak arguments, observance of neutrality and other epistemic virtues, if it is to be found in societies as a habit and praised skill, then that society will be virtuous and its relations will be healthier and with the cultivating of those virtues, Intellectual and moral development will also become easier and more common. Intellectual virtues (or praised cognitive skills) should be taught to the community members, so that they display such characteristics when engaging in social activities, whean expressing opinions, when doing research, and so on. It is important to change our education policies, because the decay of praised cognitive skills leads to devastating consequences for intellectual identity and the truth-seeking and knowledgeacquiring behavior of the community members. (shrink)

-/- FILOSOFIA: CRÍTICA À METAFÍSICA -/- PHILOSOPHY: CRITICISM TO METAPHYSICS -/- Por: Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva - UFRPE Alana Thaís Mayza da Silva - CAP-UFPE RESUMO: A Metafísica (do grego: Μεταφυσική) é uma área inerente à Filosofia, dito isto, é uma esfera que compreende o mundo e os seres humanos sob uma fundamentação suprassensível da realidade, bem como goza de fundamentação ontológica e teológica para explicação dos dilemas do nosso mundo. Logo, não goza da experiência e explicação científica com (...) base na matemática, ciências, observação, análise, etc. e sim da explicação apenas teorética sem a análise empírica. Por fim, filósofos de divergentes escolas e eras da história da filosofia fundamentaram suas críticas quanto a Metafísica; e este breve trabalho tem como objetivo analisar as críticas dos filósofos e trazer uma conclusão clara e objetiva para os leitores, sejam leigos ou não. Palavras-chave: Metafísica. Crítica. Teoria. Suprassensível. Empírico. Experiência. ABSTRACT Metaphysics is an area inherent to philosophy, that is, it is a sphere that comprises the world and human beings under a supersensitive foundation of reality, as well as enjoying ontological and theological foundations for explaining the dilemmas of our world. Therefore, it does not enjoy the scientific experience and explanation based on mathematics, science, observation, analysis, etc., but only the theoretical explanation without empirical analysis. Finally, philosophers from divergent schools and eras in the history of philosophy based their criticism of Metaphysics, and this brief work aims to analyze the criticism of philosophers and bring a clear and objective conclusion to readers, whether lay or not. Keywords: Metaphysics. Criticism. Theory. Supersensitive. Empirical. Experience. INTRODUÇÃO Para uma fundamentação alicerçada na observação, análise e conclusões pragmáticas, é imprescindível aclarar o conceito de Metafísica como esfera inerente da Filosofia, bem como disciplina primordial para o currículo do Filósofo formado nas Universidades globais. Para isso, discorro acerca do conceito de Metafísica desde a alcunha aristotélica de 'Filosofia primeira', passando à análise modernista, em especial à kantiana e seu criticismo (Crítica da Metafísica é a alma desse trabalho), sob análise de autores didáticos e, por fim, sob a elucidação da esfera Metafísica mediante os dicionários de Filosofia de Japiassú e Marcondes, e de Nicola Abbagnano. No conjunto de obras aristotélicas entituladas de Metafísica, Aristóteles buscou elucidar 'o ser enquanto ser', isto é, buscar a objetividade das coisas e do mundo mediante a subjetividade e a realidade suprassensível dessas coisas. Logo, a explicação dos fenômenos que cercavam a Grécia clássica eram explicados além do alicerce das Ciências tradicionais da época (Física, Química, Biologia, etc.). Todavia, para Aristóteles, a Metafísica consiste na 'ciência primeira' no que se refere o fornecimento de um fundamento único para todas as demais ciências, ou seja, dar-lhes o objeto ao qual elas se referem e os princípios dos quais todas elas dependem. Por fim, a Metafísica implica ser uma enciclopédia das ciências um inventário completo e exaustivo de todas as ciências, em suas relações de coordenação e subordinação, nas tarefas e nos limites atribuídos a cada uma, de modo definitivo. Na modernidade, a Metafísica perde a centralidade do mundo da Filosofia, quem é o precursor de tal declínio é Immanuel Kant e seu criticismo. Tal descendência é elucidada e aclarada posteriormente no presente trabalho. A Metafísica moderna ganha uma nova interpretação, sendo alcunhada e levada por analogia à Ontologia, expressada, segundo Kant, como conceito de gnosiologia. Para Kant, Metafísica é a fonte inerente do estudo e explicação das formas alicerçadas na razão, bem como fundamento de toda realidade suprassensível que se deve basear para elucidar e aclarar o mundo moderno. Ainda segundo o filósofo, a Metafísica é a fonte de todos os princípios reais para a explicação da realidade. Sendo ela, por fim um 'sistema filosófico' alicerçado sobre uma perspectiva ontológica, teológica e/ou suprassensível da realidade. No nosso finalismo, a inerência da Metafísica à filosofia transcende a explicação de todo o universo e sua totalidade (matéria e forma como alcunha Aristóteles). Logo, na Filosofia Clássica com Platão e, especialmente em Aristóteles, o Mito passou a ser ciência e essa ciência era determinada de Metafísica. Vale salientar que a alcunha 'Metafísica' foi, primeiramente, usada por Andrônico de Rodes . Por fim, a Metafísica primordial para fundamentar as explicações necessárias para os fenômenos que se decorrera na Grécia antiga, foi perdendo centralidade ao passo da história da filosofia e, na modernidade, com Hume e Kant passa por uma grande crise, discorrida agora no trabalho. -/- DA CRÍTICA À METAFÍSICA Platão criou um sistema metafísico de explicação da realidade e do mundo que influenciou muitos pensadores e religiosos. Boa parte da história da filosofia foi composta de sistemas metafísicos. Mas, se, por um lado, o pensamento metafísico tem uma vida longa e profícua, por outro, é alvo de críticas constantes, principalmente por filósofos modernos e contemporâneos, que questionam a validade das teses metafísicas, seja porque tratam de coisas que não podem ser conhecidas, como alma, Deus e formas inteligíveis, seja porque suas conclusões são consideradas enganosas. ARISTÓTELES E A FILOSOFIA PRIMEIRA As ciências teóricas ou teoréticas são aquelas que produzem um saber universal, válido em qualquer situação, e necessário, isto é, que não pode ser de outro modo. Essas ciências estão voltadas para a contemplação da verdade. O sábio que se dedica a elas encontra um fim em si mesmo, pois o resultado de sua investigação não gera nenhum objeto exterior, como uma construção ou uma escultura, mas beneficia sua própria alma. Elas estão organizadas em Metafísica, Matemática e Física, que inclui a Psicologia ou a ciência da alma. As principais obras teoréticas escritas por Aristóteles são Física, De anima e Metafísica. Filosofia Primeira, que chegou até nós com o nome de Metafísica, também chamada muitas vezes por Aristóteles de Teologia .com a ressalva de que Teologia aqui não tem o sentido que é dado a ela contemporaneamente), é a expressão que designava a mais elevada das ciências teoréticas, diferenciando-se da chamada Filosofia Segunda, ou Física. Aristóteles abre o Livro I da Metafísica com a célebre passagem: Todos os homens têm, por natureza, desejo de conhecer: uma prova disso é o prazer das sensações, pois, fora até da sua utilidade, elas nos agradam por si mesmas e, mais que todas as outras, as visuais [...l. (ARISTÓTELES, 1969). A busca pelo conhecimento encontra-se na própria natureza humana, desde o nascimento, mesmo que se manifeste em seu grau mais rudimentar. Prova disso é o conhecimento por meio das sensações ou dos sentidos, entre os quais se destaca o da visão. É o chamado conhecimento por empiria ou saber empírico, que não pode ser ensinado porque é adquirido imediata e concretamente quando percebemos as coisas sensíveis. Também há um saber que vem da técnica. O técnico é aquele que tem o conhecimento dos meios para chegar a um fim. Como ensina o historiador da Filosofia, Julián Marias, apesar de o saber técnico ser superior ao saber empírico, ambos são necessários em nossa vida: 1..l Portanto, a tékhne [técnica) é superior à empeiria; mas esta também é necessária, por exemplo, para curar, porque o médico não tem de curar o homem, e sim Sócrates, e o homem apenas de modo mediato. (MARIAS, J. 2015). O conhecimento metafísico é menos necessário em nossa vida cotidiana, mas nenhum outro lhe é superior. A Metafísica é o conhecimento pelas causas e, como vimos, o conhecimento é científico quando ele nos dá os princípios e as causas das coisas. Para Aristóteles, tudo o que existe é efeito de uma causa e ela é a responsável por esse algo ser necessariamente de um jeito e não de outro. De acordo com Aristóteles, conhecer algo é conhecer pela causa. Dessa forma, a explicação de algo ou o seu conhecimento deve sempre dizer por que algo é necessariamente de determinado modo. Sem esse tipo de explicaçào, não pode haver propriamente conhecimento. Daí se constata o caráter rigoroso da explicação científica: ela não apenas sabe que "algo é isto", mas é capaz de explicar por que algo é necessariamente isto. A definição aristotélica de Metafísica Chauí indaga em seu livro Iniciação à Filosofia a questão central do que Aristóteles entende por sua alcunha ou Metafísica. Chauí explana: Embora Aristóteles admita que para cada tipo de Ser e suas essências existe uma ciência teorética própria (física, biologia, psicologia, matemática, astronomia), ele também defende a necessidade de uma ciência geral, mais ampla, mais universal, anterior a todas essas, cujo objeto não seja esse ou aquele tipo de Ser, essa ou aquela modalidade de essência, mas o Ser em geral, a essência em geral. Essa ciência, para Aristóteles, é a Filosofia Primeira ou metafísica, que investiga o que é a essência e aquilo que faz com que haja essências particulares diferenciadas, que estuda o Ser enquanto Ser. (CHAUÍ, 2010). O objeto investigado pela Metafísica também é muito diferente do objeto conhecido pelo saber empírico ou pelo saber técnico. O saber empírico nos faz conhecer as coisas particulares, como Sócrates, o Oráculo de Delfos e a caneta esferográfica; o saber técnico nos faz conhecer as diversas técnicas, como os procedimentos médicos e a engenharia de construir templos. O que o saber metafísico, então, nos permite conhecer? Segundo Aristóteles, a Metafisica estuda o ser enquanto ser. Não considera o ser de modo particular como fazem as demais ciências — por exemplo, ao investigar Sócrates, os procedimentos médicos etc. mas busca o que é universal, o que envolve tanto Sócrates quanto os procedimentos médicos, tanto o Oráculo de Delfos quanto a arte de construir templos. Segundo Aristóteles, a Metafísica trata das causas primeiras, que são as quatro seguintes: • a causa material, que é a matéria de que é feita alguma coisa. Em uma escultura, por exemplo, a causa material pode ser o bronze ou o mármore; • a causa formal, que é a forma ou a essência das coisas. No exemplo da escultura, é a forma ou a aparência que possibilita que a reconheçamos como uma escultura (e não como um poste, por exemplo); • a causa eficiente, que é o agente que produz a coisa. Uma escultura é produzida por um artista; • a causa final, que é a razão ou a finalidade das coisas, A finalidade da escultura é o prazer estético. A Metafísica também se ocupa da substância. A substância responde pelos significados do ser. Mas o que é a substância? Trata-se de uma questão complexa no pensamento aristotélico. Aristóteles recusa-se a entender a substância como sendo a forma platónica. Ela nào é o suprassensível. Seria entao a substância o sensível individual? As coisas são matéria e forma; amatéria é o substrato da coisa (por exemplo, o mármore é a matéria da estátua). Sem sua forma, ela é apenas potencialidade, mas sem a matéria qualquer realidade sensível se desvaneceria. Assim, a matéria pode ser dita substância em sentido impróprio. A forma, por seu turno, é aquilo que determina a matéria, é a sua essência; ela é substancia em sentido próprio. Mas a matéria é também matéria enformada. As coisas sensíveis são, a um só tempo, matéria e forma. E esse composto também pode ser legitimamente chamado de substância. Aristóteles apresenta três gêneros de substâncias: • as substâncias sensíveis, que nascem, morrem e, por isso, passam por todo tipo de mudança; • as substancias sensíveis e incorruptíveis, que não passam por nenhum tipo de mudança, como os planetas e as estrelas; • a substância suprassensível, que é superior às outras duas: o Primeiro Motor Imóvel, o deus aristotélico, causa de todo movimento, mas sendo ele mesmo imóvel. (Ele precisa ser imóvel porque se ele também se movesse precisaria haver uma causa para esse movimento, o que levaria a uma espécie de regressão ao infinito). Assim como o demiurgo de Platão, o deus aristotélico nao é um deus criador. Não criou o Universo nem gerou o movimento dos corpos. Ao contrário, o deus de Aristóteles exerce uma atraçáo sobre o Universo, motivando sua existência, e sobre os corpos, gerando seu movimento, ou seja, atrai tudo para si como objeto de amor. Não é, portanto, causa eficiente do mundo e do movimento do mundo, mas causa final. O deus aristotélico nao cria o mundo do nada por um ato de vontade. Ele nao é causa eficiente do mundo, como indicamos ser o artista causa eficiente de sua escultura. A METAFÍSICA CLÁSSICA OU MODERNA Grandes revoluções no pensamento do século XVII deram estopim à uma grande crise na esfera metafísica. De modo resumido a Metafísica sofreu uma grande transformação e uma nova elaboração, sem a fundamentação embasada no pensamento platônico, aristotélico ou neoplatônico. Sendo assim a nova metafísica é caracterizada por: [...] afirmação da incompatibilidade entre fé e razão, acarretando a separação de ambas, de sorte que a religião e a filosofia possam seguir caminhos próprios, mesmo que a segunda não esteja publicamente autorizada a expor ideias que contradigam as verdades ou dogmas da fé [...] [...] redefinição do conceito de Ser ou substância. Os modernos conservam a definição tradicional da substância como o Ser que existe em si e por si mesmo, que subsiste em si e por si mesmo. Porém, em lugar de considerar que a substância se define por gênero e espécie, havendo tantos tipos de substâncias quantos gêneros e espécies houver, passa-se a definir a substância levando em consideração seus predicados essenciais ou seus atributos essenciais, isto é, aquelas propriedades ou atributos sem os quais uma substância não é o que ela é. Após o supracitado, os cartesianos e Descartes dirão que há somente três substâncias essenciais, divergindo totalmente do pensamento aristotélico, as substâncias cartesianas são a Alma, a matéria dos corpos e Deus. Para empiristas, só se é possível conhecer a substância corpórea, logo não se é possível elaborar uma metafísica, e sim uma geometria ou uma física que se ocupa do estudo dessas matérias corpóreas. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) explanou a primordialidade de se elaborar uma definição genérica e universal, comumente aceita por toda a comunidade de filósofos de Aristóteles a modernidade. Podemos reduzir o conceito proposto da seguinte maneira: “substância é aquilo que existe em si e por si e não depende de outros para existir”.Logo, diz Espinosa, que há apenas uma substância no Universo que não depende de outra para existir, tal substância é o próprio Deus ou a natureza. Nessa revolução do pensamento filosófico, em peculiar à metafísica, houve também a redefinição do conceito de causa e causalidade. Em Aristóteles haviam quatro tipos de causas, agora, na modernidade, se propunha apenas dois tipos: a eficiente e a final. Chauí explana que a Causa eficiente é aquela na qual uma ação anterior determina como consequência necessária a produção de um efeito, e que seu alcance é universal na natureza. Causa final é aquela que determina, para os seres pensantes, a escolha da realização ou não realização de uma ação, e que só opera na ação de Deus e nas ações humanas. Houve também, nessa revolução, uma quebra do paradigma metafísico, isto é, a metafísica não se dividia mais entre a teologia, a psicologia racional e a cosmologia racional. Agora, a metafísica ganha um novo rumo, um rumo próprio de estudo embasado em suas próprias fundamentações. Logo, a metafísica se apropria de três e apenas três ideias de substância. A substância infinita, ou o próprio Deus. A substância pensante que é a consciência como faculdade de reflexão e de representação da realidade alicerçada na razão. E, por fim, a substância extensa que é a natureza embasada nos princípios e leis regidas pela matemática e a mecânica. DAVID HUME E A CRISE DA METAFÍSICA O filósofo escocês David Hume (1711-1776) nos ajuda a entender em parte o teor das críticas ao pensamento metafísico. "Se tomarmos em nossas mãos um volume qualquer, de teologia ou metafísica escolástica, por exemplo, façamos a pergunta: contém ele qualquer raciocínio abstrato referente a números e quantidades? Não. Contém qualquer raciocínio experimental referente a questões de fato e de existência? Não. Às chamas com ele, então, pois não pode conter senão sofismas e ilusão." (HUME, 2004) Hume critica a teologia e a metafísica escolástica, que foi a metafísica praticada principalmente nas escolas cristãs durante a Idade Média, porque suas concepções não tratam nem de conceitos matemáticos, que são formais e podem levar a conclusões seguras - por exemplo, "2 + 2 = 4" -, nem de afirmações sobre fatos, que podem ser verificados empiricamente, isto é, pelos órgãos dos sentidos —como "a aceleração de um corpo em queda livre é de 9,8 metros por segundo", Assim, Hume aconselha o leitor a jogar as afirmações metafísicas na fogueira, pois são consideradas ilusões, fantasias ou produto de erros de raciocínio e nada têm a acrescentar ao conhecimento humano. A partir de Hume, a metafísica, tal como existira desde os gregos, tornara-se impossível. O CRITICISMO KANTIANO E O FIM DA METAFÍSICA CLÁSSICA Entre a Dissertação de 1770 e a Crítica da razão pura, mais de dez anos se passaram. Apesar de a obra ser volumosa, a redaçào da Crítica da razão pura não chegou a cinco meses de trabalho. De início, Kant pretendia apenas revisar sua dissertação, mas o trabalho acabou por levá-lo a figurar entre os grandes nomes do pensamento filosófico, como Aristóteles e Descartes. Kant fez um diagnóstico bastante negativo da situação da Filosofia de sua época, em particular da Metafísica, que, embora fosse considerada a Filosofia Primeira, patinava em questões impossíveis de serem resolvidas. Ao mesmo tempo, buscou inserir a Filosofia no rumo seguido pelas Ciências Naturais, pela Lógica e pela Matemática, que já tinham encontrado o caminho da Ciência. Em alguns pontos, o projeto kantiano se aproximou de algumas características do projeto cartesiano. Descartes duvidou de todo o saber conhecido, pois queria encontrar um fundamento seguro que sustentasse a edificação da Filosofia e, mais particularmente, da Ciência. Diferentemente de Descartes, contudo, Kant nào duvidou de todo o conhecimento que havia aprendido. Para ele, bastava estabelecer os limites do conhecimento racional, ou seja, o que a razão podia conhecer e o que era impossível de ser conhecido. No fim do século XVIII, de acordo com a proposta de Wolff, a Metafísica era dividida em duas partes: Metafísica geral e Metafísica especial. A primeira tratava da Ontologia (ciência do ser enquanto ser, como definido por Aristóteles), e a segunda se ocupava do ser humano (Psicologia), do mundo (Cosmologia) e de Deus (Teologia racional), Os principais temas in-vestigados eram a imortalidade da alma, a liberdade a finitude ou infinitude do mundo e a existência de Deus. No entanto, de acordo com Kant, as questões metafísicas clássicas extrapolavam as capacidades de conhecimento do ser humano, pois estavam tão afastadas da experiência que a razão só podia pensá-las, sem conhecê-las realmente. As questões postas pela Metafísica clássica extrapolavam o terreno de qualquer experiência possível e, no entanto, a razão, por sua própria natureza, apresenta questões que não pode evitar, mas que também náo pode responder por não terem nenhuma pedra de toque na experiência. Disso decorre a pergunta fundamental sobre a possibilidade de haver um conhecimento metafísico. Publicada em 1781, a Crítica da razão pura foi uma tentativa de responder a essa pergunta. A obra instituiu um "tribunal da razao" para examinar a própria razão, e não para tomar partido no conflito entre racionalistas, como Descartes e Leibniz, que elaboraram sistemas metafísicos, e empiristas, como Locke e Hume, que basearam o conhecimento unicamente nos sentidos. Criticar a razão é determinar as possibilidades, os limites e o alcance do próprio conhecimento. A transformação foi tao grande para a Filosofia que essa obra nao pôde ser ignorada. A situação da Metafísica No texto a seguir, retirado do célebre prefácio à primeira edição de Crítica da razão pura, podemos ver o diagnóstico de Kant sobre a situaçao da Metafísica no período em que vivia. A razão humana, num determinado dominio dos seus conhecimentos, possui o singular destino de se ver atormentada por questões, que náo pode evitar, pois lhe são impostas pela sua natureza, mas às quais também não pode dar resposta por ultrapassarem completamente as suas possibilidades. Não é por culpa sua que cai nessa perplexidade. Parte de princípios, cujo uso é inevitável no decorrer da experiência e, ao mesmo tempo, suficientemente garantido por esta. Ajudada por estes princípios eleva-se cada vez mais alto (como de resto lho consente a natureza) para condições mais remotas. Porém, logo se apercebe de que, desta maneira, a sua tarefa há de ficar sempre inacabada, porque as questões nunca se esgotam; vê-se obrigada, por conseguinte, a refugiar-se em princípios, que ultrapassam todo o uso possível da experiência e, não obstante, estão ao abrigo de qualquer suspeita, pois o senso comum está de acordo com eles. Assim, a razão humana cai em obscuridades e contradições, que a autorizam a concluir dever ter-se apoiado em erros, ocultos algures, sem contudo os poder descobrir. Na verdade, os princípios de que se serve, uma vez que ultrapassam os limites de toda experiência, já não reconhecem nesta qualquer pedra de toque. O teatro destas disputas infindáveis chama-se Metafísica. (KANT, I. 2010). O fim da Metafísica clássica Podemos agora retomar o questionamento sobre os motivos pelos quais a física newtoniana é possível como ciência e entender também por que a metafísica racionalista tradicional não é conhecimento científico, segundo a teoria kantiana. A física trata de regras e leis dos fenômenos, das representações conformadas pela sensibilidade e pelo entendimento, ou seja, refere-se a objetos do conhecimento humano. A metafísica clássica, por sua vez, trata de coisas que não fazem parte da experiência sensível. Deus e a alma, por exemplo, não são apreendidos pela sensibilidade, não são impressões conformadas ou fenômenos e, portanto, não podem ser conhecidos pelo ser humano. Ideias ou conceitos dessa espécie podem ser pensados pela razão, mas é impossível conhecê-los, pois estão além da capacidade humana de conhecimento. Por esse motivo, a física é possível como ciência e a metafísica tradicional não. Com base nisso, Kant provocou uma revolução na teoria do conhecimento, que ele mesmo designou como "virada copernicana na filosofia", Se Copémico mudou a forma de entender o mundo ao defender a ideia de que o Sol está no centro do sistema solar, Kant mudou a forma de o ser humano compreender o mundo e a si próprio ao estabelecer a ideia de que o ser humano, e não os objetos externos, é o centro do conhecimento, O ser humano não é um agente passivo, que só recebe informações, mas atua decisivamente na constituição do conhecimento e do que se compreende como realidade. Os elementos a priori que determinam essa constituição do conhecimento são o escopo da filosofia kantiana, também conhecida como transcendental. Logo, o pensamento kantiano alterou profundamente a Metafísica. A existência de Deus ou a imortalidade da alma, por exemplo, passaram a ser questões que já não podiam ser respondidas. Se percebemos apenas as coisas que ocorrem em um tempo específico (antes, agora, depois), como seremos capazes de perceber algo que está na eternidade (Deus)? Como afirmar que a alma é imortal se não conseguimos percebê-la com os nossos sentidos? O conhecimento a partir de Kant, então, é sempre conhecimento de objetos, isto é, de conteúdos elaborados e modificados pelo sujeito que conhece. O conhecimento passou a se ocupar, assim, de fenómenos, e não mais da própria coisa, como pretendiam os metafísicos clássicos. Com a crítica kantiana, tornou-se impossível conhecer efetivamente os temas da Metafísica clássica e emitir qualquer opinião segura sobre assuntos que não podem ser assentados na experiência. Podemos pensar sobre Deus, podemos querer que nossa a seja imortal, mas jamais teremos a possibilidade de verificar esses assuntos em nossa experiência ou mesmo ter sobre eles verdadeiro conhecimento. Nada nos impede de acreditar em Deus ou na imortalidade da alma, porém não podemos exigir que a Filosofia se pronuncie a respeito desses temas. Na verdade, a crítica kantiana não diz que Deus existe nem que não existe, mas apenas que não é capaz de saben Deus, não obstante sua importância para a Filosofia do próprio Kant, é uma questão de fé. AUGUSTE COMTE E A METAFÍSICA NO SÉCULO XIX O filósofo francês Auguste Comte (1798-1857), considerado o pai do positivismo, fundamenta sua filosofia também em oposição às concepções metafísicas. Em seu entendimento, a busca por princípios gerais ou essências, entidades que estão além do que podemos observar ou perceber pelos órgãos dos sentidos, é algo infrutífero. Comte explana: "[...] não é supérfluo assinalar agora, de modo direto, a preponderância contínua da observação sobre a imaginação, como o principal caráter lógico da sã filosofia moderna, dirigindo nossas pesquisas, não para causas essenciais, mas para leis efetivas, dos diversos fenômenos naturais. Sem ser doravante imediatamente contestado, permanece este princípio fundamental muitas vezes desconhecido nos trabalhos especiais. Embora as diferentes ordens de especulações concedam, sem dúvida, à imaginação uma alta participação, isto é, constan temente empregada para criar ou aperfeiçoar os meios da vinculação entre os fatos constatados, mas o ponto de partida e a sua direçào não lhe poderiam pertencer em nenhum caso. Ainda quando procedemos verdadeiramente a priori, é claro que as considerações gerais que nos guiam foram inicialmente fundadas, quer na ciência correspondente, quer em outra, na simples observação, única fonte de sua realidade e também de sua fecundidade. Ver para prever: tal é o caráter permanente da verdadeira ciência. Tudo prever sem ter nada visto constitui somente uma absurda utopia metafísica, ainda muito seguida." (COMTE, 1978). A observação é considerada a única fonte de realidade. Abandonando a observação e apoiando-se única e exclusivamente na imaginação, como seria característico das especulaçôes metafísicas, o pensamento pode levar não para o conhecimento das coisas, mas para a fantasia. A ciência, então, deve ter como base as coisas que podem ser observadas. Todas as especulações e as teorias científicas, em última instância, devem ter como fundamento a realidade observável. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN E A METAFÍSICA CONTEMPORÂNEA O filósofo austríaco Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) também se opõe às afirmações metafísicas por considerar que estas tratam de problemas (ou pseudoproblemas) que não podem ser formulados claramente e, portanto, não podem ser respondidos. “O método correto da filosofia seria o seguinte: só dizer o que pode ser dito, ou seja, as proposições das ciências naturais [...] e depois, quando alguém quisesse dizer algo metafísico, mostrar-lhe que nas suas proposições existem sinais aos quais não foi dada uma denotação.” (WITTGENSTEIN, 1995). Quer dizer, as sentenças ou os termos metafísicos se referem a coisas, objetos ou seres enigmáticos ou misteriosos, que não podem ser tratados com clareza, isto é, não se sabe exatamente o que são, o que impossibilitaria a formulação de problemas e soluções reais. "Deus", "alma" ou "vida após a morte", por exemplo, são termos que se referem especificamente a quê? Os "problemas" metafísicos estariam no campo do mistério e não no da investigação racional. Por isso, como afirma Wittgenstein, "acerca daquilo de que se não pode falar, tem que se ficar em silêncio". CONCLUSÃO (ÕES) Ora, a Metafísica na Grécia antiga foi imprescindível para o entendimento dos mais variados dilemas do mundo antigo, sejam perguntas simples, ou complexas. Iniciada como um sistema filosófico platônico, passando a ser filosofia primeira em Aristóteles, a metafísica incorporou elementos teológicos, psicológicos e cosmológicos durante o mundo antigo, e ainda mais durante o período medieval e a hegemônica Igreja Católica. No mundo moderno e embasado pelo “Luz da razão”, a metafísica começa a ser refutada pelos pensadores da época em questão, dentre eles o célebre cético Hume, e o emblemático Kant, além de Descartes e seus cartesianistas. Kant e seu criticismo incorporaram à Metafísica uma nova interpretação, esta que fez a mesma entrar em declínio e sair da centralidade do mundo filosófico. Kant, graças às indagações e refutações de Hume, pôde acordar do célebre “sono dogmático”. O que fez Kant se importa com a Metafísica. Kant trouxe à luz o fim da Metafísica clássica e deu legado ao início da metafísica contemporânea alcunhada de Ontologia. No decorrer da história da filosofia, a Metafísica teve intensa ascenção e vertiginosos declives, sendo seu maior declive o crítico Kant. Por fim, muitos filósofos se apropriaram de ser heterodoxos e enfrentaram de frente o mundo metafísica e a base do catolicismo sobre a realidade. Posta realidade que hoje, com o legado de Kant, da fenomenologia de Husserl, etc., originaram a nova escola filosófica chamada de Ontologia. -/- REFERÊNCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS ABBAGNANO, N. Dicionário de filosofia. 5ª. ed. Trad. Ivone Castillo Benedetti. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2007. ARANHA, M. L. de A.; MARTINS, M. H. P. Filosofando: introdução à filosofia. 5ª. ed. São Paulo: Moderna, 2013. ARISTÓTELES. Metafísica. Trad. L. Vallandro. Porto Alegre: Globo, 1969. BELO, R. dos S. Filosofia. Vol. Único. 2ª. ed. São Paulo: FTD, 2016. (Coleção Filosofia). BENOIT, L. O. Augusto Comte: fundador da física social. 1ª. ed. São Paulo: Moderna, 2002. CHAUÍ, M. Iniciação à Filosofia. 1ª. ed. São Paulo: Ática, 2010. COMTE, A. Curso de filosofia positiva. In: FERNANDES, F.; FILHO, E. de M. Comte: sociologia. São Paulo: Ática, 1978. (Coleção Grandes Cientistas Sociais). COTRIM, G.; FERNANDES, M. Fundamentos de filosofia. 2ª. ed. São Paulo: Saraiva, 2013. FERREIRO, H. Siete ensayos sobre la muerte de la Metafísica: Una introducción al idealismo absoluto a partir de la ontología. 1ª. ed. Porto Alegre: Editora Fi, 2016. FIGUEIREDO, V. de. (Org.); et. al. Filosofia: Temas e Percursos. Vol. Único. 2ª. ed. São Paulo: Berlendis & Vertecchia, 2016. FILHO, J. S. Filosofia e filosofias: existência e sentidos. 1ª. ed. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2016. HUME, D. Investigações sobre o entendimento humano e sobre os principios da moral. São Paulo: Unesp, 2004. ________. Tratado da natureza humana: uma tentativa de introduzir o método experimental de raciocínio nos assuntos morais. São Paulo: Unesp, 2001. JAPIASSÚ, H.; MARCONDES, D. Dicionário básico de filosofia. 3ª. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2001. KANT, I. Crítica da razão prática. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1989. [Textos filosóficos]. ______. Crítica da razão pura. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1979. (Col. Os Pensadores). MARIAS, J. História da filosofia. 2ª. ed. Trad. Claudia Berliner. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2015. MELANI, R. Diálogo: primeiros estudos em filosofia. Vol. Único. 2ª. ed. São Paulo: Moderna, 2016. OTERO, J. G. Compendio de filosofía: para uso de los jóvenes estudiosos. 1ª. ed. Bogotá: Imprensa de San Bernardo, 1919. SILVA, F. L. e. Descartes, a metafísica da modernidade. 1ª. ed. São Paulo: Moderna, 2006. WITTGENSTEIN, L. Tratado lógico-filosófico. 2ª. ed. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1995. -/- Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva – estudante, pesquisador, professor, agropecuarista, altruísta e defensor dos direitos humanos e dos animais. -/- Alana Thaís Mayza da Silva – estudante, potterhead, pesquisadora, projetista, musicista, filantropa, defensora dos direitos humanos e dos animais, LGBT. (shrink)

A sound historiographical account of the role of logic in the development of medieval philosophical and theological reflection requires a thorough examination of its historical roots and its theoretical implications. An apparent historiographical bias, due to the idea that only the development of contemporary formal logic enables a proper reconstruction of the whole history of logic, can be exposed by taking into account the case of the medieval discussions on the topics, starting from their late-antiquity legacy. An attentive inspection (...) of the successive stages of the gradual formalisation process of medieval topical logic brings to the fore significant theoretical aspects in the philosophy of logic, all too often left aside in common contemporary discussions. In particular, the distinction between topical maxims and topical differences, or principles according to and principles from which an inference is drawn, highlights the specific nature of a major part of medieval logic, that deals with meta-logical issues by means of higher-order logical resources. It is precisely this special character of medieval logic that proves to be of the highest significance in the discussion of the most subtle theological—and just as well philosophical—questions that engaged medieval authors, thus testifying to the essential role of logic in the overall development of medieval thought. (shrink)

This workbook of "études" offers a collection of experimental texts for communal dialogue and discovery that crosses multiple academic disciplines, including: foundations of physics, metaphysics, theoretical biology, semiotics, cognitive science, linguistics, phenomenology, logic & mathematics, poetry and theology. Each étude probes limits, horizons and boundaries by implicitly bring into relation foundational issues that characterize different academic disciplines or systems of meaning formation. Some formal techniques are deployed the études. Most notable is the use of the “logic of three” (...) to overcome falsely totalizing images and inexorable dualities. This technique involves a particular kind of attunement to the “betweenness” of mediation that is not common in modern science. The attunement draws on the formal and precise movements of analysis in concert with the metaphoric and singular movements of synthesis. (shrink)

What are the implications for human society, and for our institutions of higher learning, of the discovery of a sophisticated extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) operating on and around Earth? This book explores this timely question from a multidisciplinary perspective. It considers scientific, philosophical, theological, and interdisciplinary ways of thinking about the question, and it represents all viewpoints on how likely it is that an ETI is already operating here on Earth. The book’s contributors represent a wide range of academic disciplines in (...) their formal training and later vocations, and, upon reflection on the book’s topic, they articulate a diverse range of insights into how ETI will impact humankind. It is safe to say that any contact or communication with ETI will not be merely a game changer for human society, but it also will be a paradigm changer. It makes sense for human beings to prepare themselves now for this important transition. (shrink)

On several occasions, Báñez considered Suárez the main supporter of the Molinist doctrine along with Molina himself. According to Báñez, the main mistake of Molinism is its misunderstanding of freedom. This led him to refine his personal Thomistic theory of freedom. Free will is radically in the intellect and formally in the will. Intellect is the root of freedom because the most important indifference is found in the object, whose connection with the end is understood as not necessary. The intellect (...) aware of this indifference causes a formally free volition that is not incompatible with the effective divine motion. (shrink)

This dissertation is concerned with two of the largest questions that we can ask about the nature of physical reality: first, whether physical reality begin to exist and, second, what criteria would physical reality have to fulfill in order to have had a beginning? Philosophers of religion and theologians have previously addressed whether physical reality began to exist in the context of defending the Kal{\'a}m Cosmological Argument (KCA) for theism, that is, (P1) everything that begins to exist has a cause (...) for its beginning to exist, (P2) physical reality began to exist, and, therefore, (C) physical reality has a cause for its beginning to exist. While the KCA has traditionally been used to argue for God's existence, the KCA does not mention God, has been rejected by historically significant Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, and raises perennial philosophical questions -- about the nature and history of physical reality, the nature of time, the nature of causation, and so on -- that should be of interest to all philosophers and, perhaps, all humans. While I am not a religious person, I am interested in the questions raised by the KCA. In this dissertation, I articulate three necessary conditions that physical reality would need to fulfill in order to have had a beginning and argue that, given the current state of philosophical and scientific inquiry, we cannot determine whether physical reality began to exist. -/- Friends of the KCA have sought to defend their view that physical reality began to exist in two distinct ways. As I discuss in chapter 2, the first way in which friends of the KCA have sought to defend their view that physical reality began to exist involves a family of a priori arguments meant to show that, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, the past must be finite. If the past is necessarily finite, then the past history of physical reality is necessarily finite. And if having a finite past suffices for having a beginning, then, since the past history of physical reality is necessarily finite, physical reality necessarily began to exist. I show that the arguments which have been offered thus far for the view that the past is necessarily finite do not succeed. Moreover, as I elaborate on in chapter 5, having a finite past does not suffice for having a beginning. -/- As I discuss in chapter 3, the second way in which friends of the KCA have sought to defend their view that physical reality began to exist involves a family of a posteriori arguments meant to show that we have empirical evidence that physical reality has a finite past history. For example, the big bang is sometimes claimed to have been the beginning of physical reality and, since we have excellent empirical evidence for the big bang, we have excellent empirical evidence for the beginning of physical reality. The big bang can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, the big bang can be understood as a theory about the history and development of the observable universe. Understood in that sense, then I agree that the big bang is supported by excellent empirical evidence and by a scientific consensus. On the other hand, some authors (particularly science popularizers, science journalists, and religious apologists) have wrongly interpreted big bang theory as a theory about the beginning of the whole of physical reality. As I argue, while a beginning of physical reality may be consistent with classical big bang theory, classical big bang theory does not provide good reason for thinking that physical reality began to exist. -/- In part II, I turn to discussing three necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, conditions for physical reality to have a beginning. Before discussing the three conditions, in chapter 4, I introduce three metaphysical accounts of the nature of time (A-theory, B-theory, and C-theory) as well as some formal machinery that will subsequently become useful in the dissertation. I introduce the first of the three conditions in chapter 5. According to the Modal Condition, physical reality began to exist only if, at the closest possible worlds without time, physical reality does not exist. I show that this condition helps us to make sense of various views in both theology and philosophy of physics. In chapter 6}, I introduce the second of my three conditions, the Direction Condition, according to which, roughly, physical reality began to exist only if all space-time points agree about the direction of time, so that all space-time points can agree that physical reality's putative beginning took place in their objective past. In chapter 7, I discuss the third condition, the Boundary Condition, according to which physical reality began to exist only if there is a past temporal boundary such that physical reality did not exist before the boundary. I show that there are two senses in which physical reality could be said to have had a past temporal boundary. Lastly, in chapter 8, I show that there is a relationship between my three conditions and classical big bang theory, even though the relationship is not the one usually identified in the literature. -/- In part III, I present four arguments for the view that, at the present stage of philosophical and scientific inquiry, we cannot know whether physical reality satisfies the three necessary conditions to have had a beginning and, consequently, we cannot know whether physical reality had a beginning. As I will prove in chapter 9, no set of observations that we currently have, when conjoined with General Relativity, entails that physical reality satisfies the Direction or Boundary Conditions. As I show in chapter 10, considerations in the philosophical foundations of statistical mechanics entail either that the Cosmos violates the Modal Condition or else that there is a transcendental condition on the possibility of our knowledge of the past that prevents our access to data we would need to gather to determine whether physical reality satisfies the Boundary Condition. In chapter 11, I show that there are a number of live cosmological models according to which physical reality does not satisfy the Boundary Condition. As long as we don't know whether any of those cosmological models are correct, we do not know whether physical reality satisfies the Boundary Condition. Lastly, I turn to confirmation theory and show that, at our present stage of inquiry, ampliative inferences for the conclusion that physical reality satisfies the Modal, Direction, and Boundary Conditions are not successful. (shrink)

Arthur Norman Prior was born on 4 December 1914 in Masterton, New Zealand. He studied philosophy in the 1930s and was a significant, and often provocative, voice in theological debates until well into the 1950s. He became a lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College in Christchurch in 1946 succeeding Karl Popper. He became a full professor in 1952. He left New Zealand permanently for England in 1959, first taking a chair in philosophy at Manchester University, and then becoming a (...) fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1966. Prior died on 6 October 1969 in Trondheim, Norway. After Prior’s death, many logicians and philosophers have analysed and discussed his approach to formal and philosophical logic. In particular, his contributions to modal logic, tense-logic and deontic logic have been studied. -/- In 1957, A.N. Prior proposed the three-valued modal logic Q as a ‘correct’ modal logic from his philosophical motivations, see Prior (1957). Prior developed Q in order to offer a logic for contingent beings, in which one could intelligibly and rationally state that some beings are contingent and some are necessary, see Akama & Nagata (2005). According to Akama & Nagata (2005), Q has a natural semantics. In other words, from the philosophical point of view, Q can be regarded as an ‘actualist’ modal logic. -/- This review article is a developed description of, and discussion on, ‘The System Q’ that is the fifth chapter of Prior (1957). In addition, in his logical analysis of ‘Time & Existence’ (that is the eights chapter of Prior (1967)), Prior has worked on system Q. Thus, Prior (1967) has also been very useful for this article. This article analyses the logical structure of system Q in order to provide a more understandable description as well as logical analysis for today’s logicians, philosophers, and information-computer scientists. In the paper, the Polish notations are translated into modern notations in order to be more comprehensible and to support the developed formal descriptions as well as semantic analysis. (shrink)

This research intends to show a Kantian influence in Transcendental Thomism, particularly in Rahner, Lonergan and Von Balthasar. What is meant by a Kantian influence is a certain attitude regarding the problem of the universals, an attitude which is radically different from St. Thomas’. In my previous work (The Radical Difference between Aquinas and Kant: Human Understanding and the Agent Intellect in Aquinas [Chillum: IVE Press, 2021], the radical difference between St. Thomas and Kant was shown. In this present research, (...) what is argued is that Rahner, Lonergan and Von Balthasar follow Kant, not St. Thomas, with regard to the analysis of human understanding. From each Transcendental Thomist author mentioned above, I have taken one sample text, one most significant work where each author’s epistemology can be explored. Thus, I have selected Rahner’s Spirit in the World, Lonergan’s Verbum articles and Von Balthasar’s Theologic I. (shrink)

Saying that x is ineffable seems to be paradoxical – either I cannot say anything about x, not even that it is ineffable – or I can say that it is ineffable, but then I can say something and it is not ineffable. In this article, I discuss Alston’s version of the paradox and a solution proposed by Hick which employs the concept of formal and substantial predicates. I reject Hick’s proposal and develop a different account based on some (...) passages from Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystica Theologia. ‘God is ineffable’ is a metalinguistic statement concerning propositions about God: not all propositions about God are expressible in a human language. (shrink)

This article aims to provide a metaphysical elucidation of a specific model of the doctrine of the Trinity: Monarchical Trinitarianism, within the formal, neo–Aristotelian ontological and metaphysical framework of Jonathan Lowe (i.e. his four–category ontology and serious essentialism). Formulating the model through this ontological and metaphysical framework will enable us to explicate it in a clear and consistent manner, and the important 'multiple–natures' problem raised against the proposed model will be shown to be ineffective.

This article aims to provide an intelligible explication of the doctrine of Transubstantiation. A model of this doctrine is formulated within the formal, neo-Aristotelian metaphysical and ontological framework of Jonathan Lowe, termed Serious Essentialism and the Four-Category Ontology. Formulating the doctrine of Transubstantiation within this metaphysical and ontological framework will enable it to be explicated in a clear and consistent manner, and the oft-raised intelligibility question against it can be answered.