Metaphysics

Picture a universe made up of an infinity of points of view, each of them a minuscule soul that, without ever looking out of a window, mirrors the entire cosmos within itself — and which is nonetheless in perfect agreement with all the others, as though every clock in a vast hall had been set once and for all to strike the same hour for eternity. This is the world of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716): the last great universal scholar of the modern age — mathematician, logician, jurist, diplomat, historian and theologian — who attempted the most ambitious of syntheses, reconciling the mechanical science of his time with a metaphysics of substances and with Christian theology. His philosophy is at once one of the most coherent systems ever built and one of the bridges that connect Aristotle to the mathematical logic of the twentieth century. ...

“Does God exist?” is perhaps the oldest and most persistent question in philosophy. It has accompanied Western thought from the earliest Presocratics — when Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–c. 475 BC) criticized the anthropomorphism of Homer’s gods — to contemporary analytic debates on modal logic and Bayesian probability. And yet, posed in these terms, the question conceals a trap. For before asking whether God exists, one must ask what it means, for God, to exist. Here a decisive distinction opens up — one that separates philosophically rigorous theism from conceptual idolatry: the distinction between existing (existere) and being (esse). ...

Mário Ferreira dos Santos (1907–1968) is, in sheer scale of output, the largest systematic philosophical project ever attempted in Brazil. His Encyclopaedia of Philosophical and Social Sciences, planned in more than fifty volumes, is an undertaking without parallel in Brazilian intellectual history — and rare even in the international context of the 20th century, in which academic philosophy progressively abandoned systematic form. Whatever limitations one may identify in the work — and they exist —, Mário Ferreira’s project deserves serious academic examination: for its scope, its theoretical ambition and the singular position it occupies between Thomist scholasticism, Pythagoreanism, phenomenology and the German dialectical tradition. This article presents the life, the work and the central doctrine — Concrete Philosophy — with critical rigour and without hagiography. ...

There are three names that every history of Western philosophy is bound to utter in this order: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The sequence is not arbitrary. It is a chain of direct transmission — Socrates was Plato’s teacher; Plato was Aristotle’s teacher — which, in little more than a century, turned Athens into the centre of rational thought in the ancient world and fixed the problems, the methods and the vocabulary that philosophy would use for the next two thousand years. ...

Few philosophical traditions traverse the history of Western thought as persistently as idealism. From Plato’s Theory of Forms to Hegel’s absolute system, passing through Berkeley’s immaterialism and Kant’s critical philosophy, the claim that reality is ultimately constituted or conditioned by thought, mind, or spirit resurfaces in radically diverse guises. This article examines the major strands of philosophical idealism — their premises, arguments, and internal differences — and the decisive critiques levelled against them by Marx, Russell, and Moore. ...

Few concepts have traversed the history of Western philosophy with such persistence — and so many metamorphoses — as substance. From the Greek ousia to the Latin substantia, from Aristotelian form to the Leibnizian monad, from Cartesian res cogitans to Locke’s unknown substratum, this term has served as the axis for the most decisive metaphysical questions: What truly exists? What persists through change? What is a thing apart from its properties? ...

What is the structure of reality? What truly exists — and what is illusion, appearance, or a construction of our minds? This is the oldest, most persistent, and most vertiginous question in all of philosophy. From Thales of Miletus, who in the sixth century BC declared that everything is water, to quantum physicists who now debate whether the universe is made of vibrating strings in eleven dimensions, humanity has never stopped asking: what is this thing we call reality? ...

This is the fifth and final article on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics). We have traced the full arc of Maréchal’s historical project: from the ancient Greek tradition and Scholasticism (Cahier I), through the rationalist-empiricist conflict (Cahier II), into the depths of Kant’s critical philosophy (Cahier III), and through the analysis of post-Kantian idealism from Fichte through Schelling to Hegel (Cahier IV). In this fifth article, we arrive at Cahier V — Le thomisme devant la philosophie critique — the heart of the work, published in 1926 — where Maréchal undertakes a systematic comparison of Thomism with critical philosophy and presents his own original philosophical argument: that intellectual dynamism toward Absolute Being is a transcendental condition of the very possibility of knowledge, and that a genuine metaphysics of being is therefore not merely defensible but philosophically necessary. ...

This is the fourth of five articles on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique. In the preceding articles, we traced the classical tradition of knowledge from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas (Cahier I), the conflict between Rationalism and Empiricism culminating in Hume’s scepticism (Cahier II), and the detailed analysis of Kant’s critical philosophy — the Transcendental Aesthetic, Analytic, and Dialectic (Cahier III). Now, in Cahier IV — entitled Le système idéaliste chez Kant et les postkantiens and published posthumously in 1947, three years after Maréchal’s death — we examine how post-Kantian idealism developed the transcendental turn inaugurated by Kant, carrying it to consequences that Kant himself had neither foreseen nor authorized. ...

This is the third of five articles on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique. In the first two articles, we followed Maréchal’s historical survey from the ancient Greek tradition through medieval Scholasticism (Cahier I) and then through the modern conflict between rationalism and empiricism (Cahier II). That survey ended with Hume’s devastating skepticism — the revelation that neither the rationalist appeal to innate ideas nor the empiricist appeal to sense experience could ground the objective necessity that genuine knowledge requires. In this third article, we turn to Cahier III, which Maréchal devotes entirely to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason — the most ambitious attempt in modern philosophy to answer Hume’s challenge, and the text that casts the longest shadow over Maréchal’s entire project. ...

This is the second of five articles on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics). In the first article, we followed Maréchal’s reading of the classical tradition from the pre-Socratics through Thomas Aquinas, showing how ancient and medieval thought largely assumed a direct cognitive contact with being without needing to systematically justify that assumption. In this second article, we turn to Cahier II, in which Maréchal examines the great modern debate between rationalism and empiricism — and shows how both traditions, despite opposing each other on almost every point, ultimately leave the problem of objectivity unresolved and prepare the ground for Kant’s revolutionary critique. ...

This is the first of five articles dedicated to Joseph Maréchal’s monumental work Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics), published in five notebooks (cahiers) between 1922 and 1947. Each article follows one cahier, tracing Maréchal’s ambitious project: to demonstrate, through a rigorous historical and critical method, that a genuine metaphysics of being is not only possible after Kant but is in fact demanded by the very structure of human knowledge. This first article covers Cahier I, which examines the classical tradition from ancient Greece through the end of medieval Scholasticism. ...

Adi Shankara Note on dating: The dates of Ādi Śaṅkara (also spelled Shankara; honorifically Śaṅkarācārya, “the teacher Śaṅkara”) are disputed. Tradition places him at 788–820 CE, but many modern scholars prefer an earlier dating, around c. 700–750 CE. His biography became interwoven with hagiographical material, so that many episodes of his life belong more to legend than to verifiable historical record. Śaṅkara is the most influential systematizer of Advaita Vedānta, the “non-dualist” current of Hindu philosophy. His work consists chiefly of rigorous commentaries on the canonical texts, in which he defends a metaphysics where the multiplicity of the world is ultimately reducible to a single reality. His influence on later Indian thought — and on the Western reception of Hinduism — is immense. ...

Al-Farabi Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Fārābī (c. 872–c. 950) was one of the greatest philosophers of the medieval Islamic world, called by the tradition “the Second Teacher” (al-Muʿallim al-Thānī) — the first being Aristotle. Born in the region of Farab (present-day Kazakhstan/Uzbekistan), he worked principally in Baghdad and Aleppo under the patronage of the Hamdanid court. His work spans logic, political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of music, and theory of the sciences. ...

Aristotle Born in Stagira, in Macedonia, around 384 BCE, the son of Nicomachus — physician to the Macedonian court — Aristotle entered Plato’s Academy at the age of seventeen, where he remained for some twenty years, until his master’s death. He later tutored Alexander the Great and, in 335 BCE, founded the Lyceum in Athens, a school whose members became known as Peripatetics (from their habit of discussing while walking). With Alexander’s death and the wave of anti-Macedonian feeling, he left Athens in 323 BCE — so that the city, according to ancient tradition, “might not sin twice against philosophy” — and died the following year in Chalcis. The body of texts we have inherited from him is the largest and most systematic of antiquity, spanning logic, physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics. ...

Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) Born in 980 near Bukhara, in Persian-speaking Central Asia, Abu Ali Ibn Sīnā — Latinized as Avicenna — was a prodigy: it is said that by the age of eighteen he had already mastered the medicine of his time. He led a turbulent life, amid courts, imprisonments, and posts as vizier, yet left more than two hundred works. His Canon of Medicine was the principal medical textbook in the West for centuries, and his Book of Healing is a vast philosophical encyclopedia. He is the greatest philosopher of the medieval Islamic world, and his name is bound to a distinction that would transform Western metaphysics. ...

Buddha Note on sources and dating: The dates of Siddhārtha Gautama (also called Śākyamuni, “the sage of the Śākya clan”) are a matter of scholarly controversy. The traditional chronology places him at c. 563–483 BCE, but revised research of recent decades favours a “short chronology,” locating his death around 400 BCE (an approximate lifespan of c. 480–400 BCE). Equally important: the Buddha’s teachings were transmitted orally for generations and were only set down in writing centuries later, above all in the Pāli Canon (Tipiṭaka, Sanskrit Tripiṭaka). These texts are therefore not writings of the Buddha himself but later records of the monastic community, and reconstructing what he historically taught is a delicate philological task. ...

David Chalmers David John Chalmers is one of the most influential philosophers of mind of the past three decades. Born in Sydney, Australia, and trained in mathematics before turning to philosophy, Chalmers became a professor at the University of Arizona and later at New York University (NYU), where he co-directs the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. His debut book, The Conscious Mind (1996), redefined the terms of the debate on consciousness and placed what he named the “hard problem” at the centre of the philosophical and scientific agenda. ...

Farias Brito Raimundo de Farias Brito (1862–1917), born in the state of Ceará, is regarded as one of the most original thinkers in Brazilian philosophy of his period. At a time dominated by positivism and a scientifically inspired materialism, Farias Brito developed a spiritualism of his own, in which consciousness is taken as the fundamental reality and as the true starting point of philosophical reflection. His strongly metaphysical work is directed against the reduction of reality to mere material mechanism and seeks to place the problem of spirit once more at the centre of philosophy. Although less read outside specialist circles, he exerted a lasting influence on the Brazilian Catholic and spiritualist thought of the following generations. ...

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Born in Leipzig in 1646, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the last great universal sage: at once philosopher, mathematician, logician, physicist, jurist, historian, and diplomat. He invented — independently of Newton — the infinitesimal calculus, whose notation we still use, conceived the binary arithmetic that underlies computing, and designed calculating machines. He spent much of his life in the service of the House of Hanover and died in 1716, leaving a body of work scattered across thousands of letters and few published books. Philosophically, he sought the great reconciliation of modern science, the metaphysical tradition, and faith. ...