Abstract

What is ultimately real? Is there a fixed nature to reality? If so, is that nature knowable by the human mind? Philosophers have been confronted with these questions since the very inception of philosophy in ancient Greece. In the history of philosophy various answers to these intellectual riddles have been articulated. As a general rule, the metaphysical issues concerning the ultimate nature of reality have been dealt with from what we could call, along with Joseph Margolis, the perspective of archism.1 A vast majority of philosophers have constructed their theories under the tacit assumption that there is a way things are in themselves, and that reality possesses invariant, primitive structures that make it so. ..