Category: Idealism and Realism
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Ruminations on the Dative of Disclosure
Steven Nemes comments on my long Husserl entry: [Robert] Sokolowski’s reflections in his Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2000) are also helpful. He maintains that the transcendental ego is not substantially different than the empirical ego. In other words, the transcendental ego is not some different substance from the empirical ego, i.e. the [animated]…
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Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?
I return an affirmative answer. If God creates ex nihilo, and everything concrete other than God is created by God, and God is a pure spirit, then one type of metaphysical realism can be excluded at the outset. This realism asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things other than God. 'Radically transcendent' means…
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Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness?
That depends. It depends on what 'world' means. Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former's Facebook page: [1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not…
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How to Make Your Penis Go Away in the Eyes of the Law: Identify as a Woman!
'Karen' White is a man sporting a healthy, nature-made penis. In 2003 and 2016 'she' put the organ in question to work in the rape of two different women. So of course 'she' ended up in a women's prison where — you guessed it — 'she' sexually assaulted women, not 'women,' women. Rod Dreher reports…
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Creation, Existence, and Extreme Metaphysical Realism
This entry is a continuation of the ruminations in The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation. Recapitulation Divine creation ex nihilo is a spiritual/mental 'process' whereby an object of the divine consciousness is posited as non-object, as more than a merely intentional object, and thus as a transcendent reality. By 'transcendent reality' I mean an item…
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The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation
God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness…
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Wittgenstein and Butchvarov on the Self
This entry supplements the earlier entry on what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus calls the metaphysical subject. (5.633) Wittgenstein As I read him, Wittgenstein accepts Hume's famous rejection of the self as an object of experience or as a part of the world. "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas."…
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A Refutation of Metaphysical Idealism?
K. G. presents me with what he calls a conceivability argument against metaphysical idealism: Let P denote the proposition "I have a body." Then the argument would take the form 1. P is conceivable. 2. If P is conceivable, then P is possible. 3. If P is possible, then metaphysical idealism is false. Therefore, metaphysical…
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Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity
From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox. Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism discussed by Butchvarov, as I construe it, the numbers in parentheses being page references to his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only…
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The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov’s Solution
In his highly original Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism (Walter de Gruyter 2015) Panayot Butchvarov argues that philosophy in its three main branches, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, needs to be freed from its anthropocentrism. Philosophy ought to be “dehumanized.” This entry will examine how Butchvarov proposes to dehumanize metaphysics. These Butchvarov posts are exercises toward…
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Is New Jersey an Artifact? And Everything Else Too?
We are makers. We make some things physically, other things conceptually. If I hanker after an ‘early undergraduate’ bookshelf, I fabricate it from bricks and boards. But I also make poems, puns, blog posts, and taxonomies. We undoubtedly have the power to make, and very considerable powers when we work in concert with intelligent others;…
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Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism
Dr. James Barham writes, I have just finished reading your most instructive and thought-provoking book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence. On p. 257, you write: "(We will have to consider whether our view also undercuts realism.)" However, I did not see any discussion of this issue in the rest of the book. …
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Incompleteness, Completeness, and the External World
David Brightly comments: I appreciate that in discussing these epistemological issues we must use the non-question-begging, existence-neutral sense of 'see'. My point is that for the distinction between 'complete' and 'incomplete' to make any sense, the epistemological question as to whether seeing is existence-entailing has to have already been settled favourably, though with the caveat…
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Be Afraid
In this fine piece, Marilyn Penn takes Thomas Friedman to task. Her article begins thusly (emphasis added): In Thomas Friedman’s op ed on the Boston marathon massacre (Bring On the Next Marathon, NYT 4/17), the boldface caption insists “We’re just not afraid anymore.” Perhaps this is true for a traveling journalist who doesn’t use the subway…
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Phenomenon and Existence
E. C. writes: In the recent post Mary Neal’s Out of Body Experiences you state: "No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object. Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics." I have been attempting to reconstruct your reasoning here, and the following is the best…