4/25/2023 0 Comments Inspirit metaphysical2 Serious EssentialismģIt is vital for my purposes in this paper that the doctrine of essentialism be suitably understood. Then I shall try to explain why I think that conceptual-ism can provide no adequate substitute for this form of essentialism and inevitably collapses into an incoherent variety of global anti-realism. I shall begin with a sketch of the version of essentialism that I favour - a version that I call serious essentialism - and in the course of doing so I shall identify its three key principles. This is despite the fact that one important way in which its adherents differ from the historical Kant is in their emphasis upon language as the medium of thought, as a result of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy that occurred in the early-to-mid twentieth century.ĢMy aim in the present paper is to show that and why conceptualist anti-realism is an incoherent doctrine and why and how we can and must support metaphysical realism and robust essentialism, while still properly acknowledging the cognitive role of concepts in mediating our grasp of the nature of mind-independent reality. This view has its historical roots in Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, so that contemporary conceptualist anti-realism may, without undue distortion, be described as ‘neo-Kantian’ in spirit. Many modern forms of anti-realism have their basis in a form of conceptualism, according to which all truths about essence knowable by us are ultimately grounded in our concepts - that is, in our ways of thinking about things - rather than in things ‘in themselves'. ‘Identity’ in this sense means individual essence, which John Locke aptly characterized as ‘the very being of any thing, whereby it is, what it is’. Metaphysical realism is committed, in my opinion, to a robust form of essentialism, that is, to the doctrine that there are mind-independent facts about the identities of most objects. 1 Metaphysical Realism versus Conceptual-ist Anti-Realismġ Metaphysical realism is the view that most of the objects that populate the world exist independently of our thought and have their natures independently of how, if at all, we conceive of them.
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