I investigate the consequences of Nietzsche's perspectivism for notions of truth and objectivity, and show how the metaphor of visual perspective motivates an epistemology that avoids self-referential difficulties. Perspectivism's claim that every view is only one view, applied to itself, is often supposed to preclude the perspectivist's ability to offer reasons for her epistemology. Nietzsche's arguments for perspectivism depend on “internal reasons”, which have force not only in their own perspective, but also within the standards of alternative perspectives. Internal reasons (...) allow a perspectivist argument against dogmatism without presupposing aperspectival criteria for theory choice. Nietzsche also offers “internal” conceptions of truth and objectivity which reduce them to a matter of meeting our epistemic standards. This view has pluralistic implications, which conflict with common sense, but it is nevertheless consistent and plausible. Nietzsche's position is similar to Putnam's recent internalism, and this is due to their common Kantian heritage. (shrink)

This paper considers the charge that fictions and metaphors are non-normal, non-serious, non-primary uses of communication. This charge was made when Plato undertook the first critique of narrative art; and, ever since Aristotle’s Poetics, what there is that might be called a philosophy of narrative art has always seemed duty-bound to worry about it. This apologetic predicament has limited the development of a philosophy of fiction. The complementary charge—that literal, non-fictional uses have normal, serious and primary status in human communication, (...) and that fictions and metaphors are parasitic uses—is widely held; and, as expressed by John Austin in his theory of speech acts, it drew a response from Jacques Derrida, setting off a curious little debate between two philosophical traditions that have normally been as oil and water to one another. This paper investigates the relation between literal and non-fictional uses on the one hand, and metaphorical and fictional uses on the other. In the matter of determining the status of priority, it looks to the history of selection—both natural and social selection—of communicative traits and functions. Though it deals mainly with language, it argues that the questions should be generalised to cover human symbolic communication generally, if only because human symbolic communication has not evolved in isolation from mimetic acts and linguistic acts are themselves so often mimetic. And it argues that, because of the nature of conditional inferences involved in symbolic communication, metaphorical and fictive forms are inseparable from normal, serious, primary use. This ‘defence of poesy’ as contemporary with and inseparable from reason is offered not simply as a contribution to the philosophy of language, but primarily as a contribution to a philosophy of fiction. (shrink)

The reflections recorded in this paper arise from three moments in the theory of definition and of conceptual analysis. The moments are: Frege’s review of Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic, the discussion there of the paradox of analysis, and the division that Frege marks, ensuing upon his distinction of Sinn/sense from Bedeutung/reference, between two different conceptions of definition; Leibniz’s still serviceable account of a distinction between the clarity and the distinctness of ideas---a distinction that prompts the suggestion that the guiding purpose (...) of lexical definition is Leibnizian clarity whereas that of real definition is inseparable from the pursuit of Leibnizian distinctness; Leibniz’s speculations concerning the limit or terminus of analysis. The apparent failure of these speculations, casting doubt as it does upon the aspirations that give rise to them, points to the long-standing need to reconfigure the philosophical business of enquiry into concepts. (shrink)

This article seeks to recover a neglected chapter in the historical and theoretical background of social theory in general and critical theory in particular with a view to refining the understanding of the presuppositions of a cognitively enhanced critical social science appropriate to our troubled times. For this purpose, it offers a brief reconstruction of the mathematical-philosophical tradition from ancient to modern times by extrapolating that part of it that is marked by the ideas of infinity, infinite processes and limit (...) concepts. It gives suggestive indications not only of how these ideas relate to extant social-theoretical thought, but especially also of the two related cognitive directions – the weak-naturalistic and the socio-cultural – in which such thought is currently challenged to go. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

Leibniz is unclear about the nature of pleasure. In some texts, he describes pleasure as a perception of perfection, while in other texts he describes pleasure as being caused by a perception of perfection. In this article, I disambiguate two senses of “perception of perfection”, which clarifies Leibniz’s considered position. I argue that pleasure is a perception of an increase in a substance’s power which is caused by a substance’s knowledge of a perfection of the universe or God. This reading (...) helps clarify the nature of Leibnizian happiness. Happiness is a cognitive process (akin to a mood), constituted fundamentally out of pleasure, which is grounded in increases in a substance’s power. A rational substance will sustain its happiness so long as it is more powerful than it is weak, and it is engaging in activities that increase its power. (shrink)

Leibniz, it seems, wishes to reduce statements involving relations or extrinsic denominations to ones solely in terms of individual accidents or, respectively, intrinsic denominations. His reasons for this appear to be that relations are merely mental things (since they cannot be individual accidents) and that extrinsic denominations do not represent substances as they are on their own. Three interpretations of Leibniz''s reductionism may be distinguished: First, he allowed only monadic predicates in reducing statements (hard reductionism); second, he allowed also `implicitly (...) relational predicates'' such as `loves somebody'' (soft reductionism); third, he allowed also `explicitly relational predicates'' such as `loves Helen'' (nonreductionism). Hard reductionism is problematic with respect to Leibniz''s doctrines of universal expression and incompossibility (among other things). Nonreductionism, in turn, faces insurmountable problems with Leibniz''s doctrine of self-sufficiency and internal identification of substances, as well as with that of individual accidents. The remaining option, soft reductionism, standing between the other two interpretations, arguably avoids at least some of their problems. (shrink)

The paper discusses Leibniz's theory of denominations, expression, and individual notions, the central claim being that the key to many of Leibniz's fundamental theses is to consider his argument, starting from his predicate-in-subject account of truth (that in a true statement the notion of the predicate is contained in that of the subject), against purely extrinsic denominations: this argument shows why there is an internal foundation for all denominations, why everything in the world is interconnected, why each substance expresses all (...) the others, and why every change in the world is reflected as a real, internal change in every substance. (shrink)

In his recent paper, Winch attacks a group of theories he calls cognitivism. These theories agree in holding that ‘the ability to think, both consciously and subconsciously, amounts to an ability to internally manipulate symbolic representations of that which we think about.The relevance of this attack to education is that ‘Cognitivism’ supplies plausible‐looking reasons for thinking that learning can take place without instruction, practice, memorisation or training and its prestige as a theory of learning devalues those activities within education.Its rejection (...) should therefore lead us to re‐examine our need for explicit teacher‐oriented pedagogies’.Cognitivism has led to an emphasis on autonomous learning and a consequent devaluing of the role of overt teaching, ‘the active transmission of knowledge and technique by an authoritative figure’. (shrink)

According to the standard view of his metaphysics, Leibniz endorses idealism: the thesis that the world is made up solely of minds or monads and their perceptual and appetitive states. Recently,this view has been challenged by some scholars, who argue that Leibniz can be seen as admitting corporeal substances, that is, animals or embodied souls, into his ontology, and that, therefore, it is false to attribute a strict idealism to him. Subtler accounts suggest that Leibniz begins his philosophical career as (...) an advocate of (some form of) the modern ‘mechanical’ philosophy and ends his career as an idealist, raising the issue when and why Leibniz adopts his monadological metaphysics. This article argues that, given a constellation of metaphysical, logical, and theological views, Leibniz is committed to the ontological primacy of mind or form even in his ‘middle years’. (shrink)

Pandeism is the belief that God chose to wholly become our Universe, imposing principles at this Becoming that have fostered the lawful evolution of multifarious structures, including life and consciousness. This article describes and defends a particular form of pandeism: living God pandeism (LGP). On LGP, our Universe inherits all of God's unsurpassable attributes—reality, unity, consciousness, knowledge, intelligence, and effectiveness—and includes as much reality, conscious and unconscious, as is possible consistent with retaining those attributes. God and the Universe, together “God-and-Universe,” (...) is also eternal into the future and the past. The article derives testable hypotheses from these claims and shows that the evidence to date confirms some of these while falsifying none. Theism cannot be tested in the same way. (shrink)

It has recently been suggested that, for Leibniz, temporal facts globally supervene on causal facts, with the result that worlds differing with respect to their causal facts can be indiscernible with respect to their temporal facts. Such an interpretation is at variance with more traditional readings of Leibniz’s causal theory of time, which hold that Leibniz reduces temporal facts to causal facts. In this article, I argue against the global supervenience construal of Leibniz’s philosophy of time. On the view of (...) Leibniz defended here, he adopts a non-modal reduction of time to events, a form of reductionism that entails a strong covariation between a world’s temporal facts and its causal facts. Consequently, worlds discernible with respect to their temporal facts must be discernible with respect to their causal facts, and worlds discernible with respect to their causal facts must be discernible with respect to their temporal facts. This position strongly favors the standard identificatory reduction of time to causation often imputed to Leibniz. (shrink)

Leibniz's philosophy of time, often seen as a precursor to current forms of relationalism and causal theories of time, has rightly earned the admiration of his more recent counterparts in the philosophy of science. In this article, I examine Leibniz's philosophy of time from a new perspective: the role that tense and non-tensed temporal properties/relations play in it. Specifically, I argue that Leibniz's philosophy of time is best (and non-anachronistically) construed as a non-tensed theory of time, one that dispenses with (...) tensed temporal properties such as past, present, and future. In arguing for this thesis, I focus on the three facets of Leibniz's philosophy most relevant for evaluating his commitment to a B-theory of time: (1) the nature of change, (2) the reality of the future, and (3) the truth-conditions for tensed temporal statements. Despite prima facie evidence to the contrary, I show that a close examination of Leibniz's views on these topics provides compelling evidence for interpreting his philosophy of time as a B-theory of time. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a fresh interpretation of Leibniz’s theory of space, in which I explain the connection of his relational theory to both his mathematical theory of analysis situs and his theory of substance. I argue that the elements of his mature theory are not bare bodies (as on a standard relationalist view) nor bare points (as on an absolutist view), but situations. Regarded as an accident of an individual body, a situation is the complex of its angles (...) and distances to other co-existing bodies, founded in the representation or state of the substance or substances contained in the body. The complex of all such mutually compatible situations of co-existing bodies constitutes an order of situations, or instantaneous space. Because these relations of situation change from one instant to another, space is an accidental whole that is continuously changing and becoming something different, and therefore a phenomenon. As Leibniz explains to Clarke, it can be represented mathematically by supposing some set of existents hypothetically (and counterfactually) to remain in a fixed mutual relation of situation, and gauging all subsequent situations in terms of transformations with respect to this initial set. Space conceived in terms of such allowable transformations is the subject of Analysis Situs. Finally, insofar as space is conceived in abstraction from any bodies that might individuate the situations, it encompasses all possible relations of situation. This abstract space, the order of all possible situations, is an abstract entity, and therefore ideal. (shrink)

I argue that Leibniz’s doctrine of sensory representation is intended in part to close an explanatory gap in his philosophical system. Unlike the twentieth century explanatory gap, which stretches between neural states on one side and phenomenal character on the other, Leibniz’s gap lies between experiences of secondary qualities like color and taste and the objects that cause them. The problem is that the precise arrangement and distribution of such experiences can never be given a full explanation. In response, Leibniz (...) appeals to representation. I argue that the sense in which Leibnizian sensations are representations is too weak to close his explanatory gap. In the end, he must appeal to the doctrine of the best possible world. (shrink)

Commonsense reasoning about the physical world, as exemplified by "Iron sinks in water" or "If a ball is dropped it gains speed," will be indispensable in future programs. We argue that to make such predictions (namely, envisioning), programs should use abstract entities (such as the gravitational field), principles (such as the principle of superposition), and laws (such as the conservation of energy) of physics for representation and reasoning. These arguments are in accord with a recent study in physics instruction where (...) expert problem solving is related to the construction of physical representations that contain fictitious, imagined entities such as forces and momenta (Larkin 1983). We give several examples showing the power of physical representations. (shrink)

Philosophical work on explanation has focused on the following two topics: theories of explanation, intended to enumerate necessary and sufficient conditions for explanation, and inference to the best explanation as the strongest form of justification for ontological or metaphysical claims. I critically examine the most important philosophical work in both of these areas and defend my own conclusions about the connections between explanation and ontology. I argue that all of our inferences about the nature of the world, in ontology or (...) metaphysics, presuppose criteria for acceptable explanation. I first examine the metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, and Leibniz, arguing that their metaphysical reasoning was guided by assumptions about the nature of explanation. I also survey some recent work in ontology and find inference to the best explanation offered as the strongest available method of defending existence claims. To conclude this discussion, I offer an original argument for the thesis that all reasoning about existence claims, being nondeductive, presupposes some criteria for acceptable explanations, or a theory of explanation. Carl Hempel and Wesley Salmon have been two of the most influential philosophers offering theories of explanation, and I examine their work with the intention of discovering ontological or metaphysical assumptions shaping their theories of explanation. I argue that Hempel's theory rests on deterministic assumptions, and I argue the Salmon's theory of causality, which he admits supports his theory of explanation, is subject to empiricist criticisms. Theories of explanation typically rest on assumptions about the nature of the world, I argue, and I explain why this is so with an original theory of explanation connecting it to the psychological phenomenon of understanding. We rely on understanding in the identification of explanations, and understanding requires establishing a metaphysical context for an explanandum-event. I end by indicating the possibility of generating vicious justificatory circles through the reciprocal relationship of support between explanation and ontology, and I argue that vicious circles can be avoided only by grounding all ontological reasoning in a fundamental explanatory task of giving order to experience through a system of categories. (shrink)