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. ...

Gilles Deleuze French philosopher; created a philosophy of difference and multiplicity that subverts the metaphysical tradition centered on identity. Produced solo works and collaborations with Félix Guattari. Key Concepts Difference in itself (Difference and Repetition, 1968): difference is not derived from identity — it is originary; identity is secondary to difference. Critique of the tradition that always subordinated difference to the Same Rhizome (with Guattari): against the arborescent model (single root, hierarchy, center), the rhizome is horizontal multiplicity without point of origin or destination — connects any point with any other. Metaphor for thought, politics, and culture Lines of flight (lignes de fuite): every social and subjective system contains forces of deterritorialization that escape dominant structures — creation of the new, resistance to control Plane of immanence: reality has no transcendence; everything is immanent to a single plane of forces and intensities — against Platonic dualism and theological transcendence Desire as production (with Guattari): against Freud (desire as lack) — desire is productive, affirmative force; capitalism captures desiring production but it always overflows Body without organs: surface of intensities without prior organization — against the organism as normative model of the body Concept of concept: philosophy creates concepts — it does not represent, contemplate, or communicate; creating concepts is the philosopher’s specific task Influenced by Bergson — duration, multiplicity, creation (Bergsonism, 1966) Nietzsche — will to power, eternal return, affirmation (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962) Spinoza — immanence and power (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1970) Hume — radical empiricism and associationism Influenced Cultural studies and queer theory Cognitive sciences and biology (self-organization) Architecture, contemporary art Post-Marxist political theory Works Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962); Bergsonism (1966); Difference and Repetition (1968); The Logic of Sense (1969); Anti-Oedipus (1972, with Guattari); A Thousand Plateaus (1980, with Guattari); What is Philosophy? (1991, with Guattari). ...

Giorgio Agamben Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher born in Rome in 1942, professor at the universities of Verona and Venice (IUAV), as well as at various European and American institutions. His work articulates historical-philological analysis, political philosophy, ontology, and theory of language around a genealogical project on the biopolitical paradigm of the West. He is one of the most translated and debated contemporary thinkers. Key Concepts Homo Sacer (Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995): Revisiting a figure from archaic Roman law, Agamben describes the homo sacer as one who can be killed by anyone without it constituting homicide (occidi), but who cannot be sacrificed (immolari). This figure articulates bare life (nuda vita / zōē) — the mere biological fact of living — excluded from politically qualified life (bíos). ...

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. ...

Hilary Putnam Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the most versatile and intellectually honest philosophers of the twentieth century. Over a career spanning six decades, mostly at Harvard, Putnam pursued an unusual philosophical itinerary: he defended positions that he later criticised with the same energy with which he had established them. He was a functionalist and then rejected functionalism; a scientific realist and then proposed “internal realism”; a sympathiser with logical positivism and then its critic. This willingness for self-criticism is one of the hallmarks of his philosophical style. ...

Joseph Maréchal was a Belgian Jesuit philosopher and psychologist, founder of Transcendental Thomism — a movement that undertook a synthesis between Thomistic metaphysics and Kant’s critical philosophy. His work marks a decisive moment in the renewal of Scholasticism in the 20th century and exerted profound influence on figures such as Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. Key Concepts The Starting Point of Metaphysics (Le Point de départ de la Métaphysique, 5 notebooks, 1922–1947): His principal work. Maréchal traces the history of epistemology — from Greek philosophy through Kantianism — to ground Thomistic metaphysics in the face of Kantian critique. Notebook V (“Thomism Confronting Critical Philosophy”) is the most discussed. ...

Laozi (老子) Essential historical note: The existence of Laozi as an individual historical figure is debated among specialists. The historian Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BCE), in the Shiji, records several traditions about Laozi without being able to decide between them — an indication that the uncertainty is ancient. The text attributed to him, the Dàodéjīng (道德經, “Classic of the Way and Virtue”, also called the Laozi), may be a compilation of material from different sources; modern scholarship places the current form of the text in the 4th or 3rd century BCE. The figure of Laozi as an ancient sage who supposedly met Confucius and then left China westward is probably legendary. ...

Mário Ferreira dos Santos Mário Ferreira dos Santos was the most prolific Brazilian philosopher of the 20th century, author of more than fifty works seeking to build a comprehensive philosophical system — known as Concrete Philosophy — synthesising the classical Western tradition (especially Pythagoreanism, Aristotle, and Scholasticism) with original contributions in ontology, mathematics, symbolism, and theory of knowledge. Key Concepts Concrete Philosophy: The name Ferreira dos Santos gave to his systematic project. It stands opposed both to the abstract logicism of the analytic tradition and to existentialist subjectivism. The “concrete” is reality considered in the fullness of its determinations — neither raw empirical data nor pure abstraction, but the dialectical synthesis of both. ...

McTaggart John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was born in London on 3 September 1866 and spent virtually his entire career as a fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge; he retired in 1923 and died in London on 18 January 1925. Shaped by the British Idealism of the late nineteenth century — alongside Francis Herbert Bradley and decisively influenced by Hegel — McTaggart developed a systematic and strikingly original metaphysics that sets itself apart from Bradley’s absolute monism on one side and the emergent naturalism that would come to dominate twentieth-century philosophy on the other. His magnum opus, The Nature of Existence (2 vols., 1921–1927), stands as one of the last grand metaphysical systems in the English-speaking philosophical tradition, built with a logical rigour that bears comparison to Hegel’s Science of Logic. In the philosophy of time, his distinction between the A-series and the B-series — published in the article “The Unreality of Time” (Mind, 1908) — became the obligatory starting point for every subsequent debate on the ontology of time. ...

Nāgārjuna Nāgārjuna (c. 150–c. 250 CE) is the founder of the Mādhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism and is regarded in many Buddhist traditions as the second Buddha. His work exercised decisive influence on Tibetan, Chinese (and thence Japanese and Korean) Buddhism, as well as on subsequent Indian philosophy. His principal work, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK — Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), is one of the most commented and debated texts in the history of philosophy. ...

Parmenides Born in Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy, and active in the first half of the fifth century BCE, Parmenides is the founder of ontology — the inquiry into being as being — and the greatest figure of the so-called Eleatic school. He expounded his thought in a philosophical poem, On Nature, of which fragments survive: in it, a young man is carried in a chariot to a goddess who reveals the truth to him. ...

Plato Student of Socrates and the most influential philosopher of antiquity, Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family around 428 BCE. His master’s execution in 399 BCE marked him deeply and turned him away from the political career his lineage had reserved for him. After years of travel — which tradition links to contact with the Pythagoreans of southern Italy and to his failed attempts to educate the tyrants of Syracuse — he founded the Academy around 387 BCE, the first institution of higher learning in the West, which would endure for more than nine centuries. His work has reached us almost intact, almost entirely in the form of dialogues, with Socrates as the central character. ...

Plotinus Born around 205 CE, probably in Roman Egypt, Plotinus studied for years in Alexandria under the enigmatic master Ammonius Saccas and later settled in Rome, where he founded a school and led a life of remarkable asceticism. His lessons were gathered and organized by his disciple Porphyry in the Enneads. He is the founder of Neoplatonism and the greatest philosopher of late antiquity, making Plato the starting point of one of the most grandiose metaphysics ever conceived. ...

Proclus Proclus Lycaeus Diadochus (in Greek Próklos Lýkios Diádokhos, “Proclus the Lycian, the Successor”) was born in Constantinople in 412 CE and died in Athens on 17 April 485 CE. A caveat: he should not be confused with Proclus Procopius (an orator of the 5th century) or other homonymous late-antique figures. The son of a wealthy family from Lycia (in the south of present-day Turkey), he was educated in Alexandria and soon moved to Athens, where he studied with Plutarch of Athens (not to be confused with the essayist of Chaeronea) and with Syrianus, whom he succeeded as head of the Academy — hence his title Diádokhos, “the Successor.” He was the last great systematizer of pagan Neoplatonism before the closure of the Academy by Emperor Justinian in 529 CE. His work organizes the Plotinian inheritance into a rigorous network of propositions and triads, in a project comparable, in ambition, to Aquinas’s Summa — but in an entirely pagan key. ...

Rodolfo Kusch Born in Buenos Aires in 1922, into a family of German origin, Rodolfo Kusch united philosophy and anthropology in a rare way: instead of thinking America from European books, he traveled through northwestern Argentina and the Bolivian highlands in extensive fieldwork, listening to Quechua and Aymara thought. From this experience arose a radical question: is European ontology really capable of comprehending the greater part of human experience? His answer turns on a distinction that Spanish — and Portuguese — allow with singular clarity: that between being (ser) and dwelling (estar). “Being” expresses the modern Western mode: to be something, to produce, to assert oneself, to project oneself. “Dwelling” expresses another way of inhabiting the world: to be here, rooted in the land, in the community, in the here-and-now — the mode proper to the human being of deep America. For Kusch these are two distinct and irreducible ontologies. ...

Saul Kripke Saul Aaron Kripke was arguably the most technically gifted analytic philosopher of his generation. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he showed extraordinary aptitude from adolescence: he published his first mature logical article — a completeness proof for modal logic — at eighteen, and corresponded with professional logicians while still in high school. A professor at Princeton and later at the CUNY Graduate Center, Kripke transformed metaphysics, philosophy of language, and modal logic to such a degree that virtually all analytic philosophy after the debates surrounding Naming and Necessity is, in some sense, a response to him. ...

Vladímir Soloviov Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (28 January 1853, Moscow — 13 August 1900, the Uzkoye estate near Moscow) was a philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic — the first Russian thinker to build a comprehensive metaphysical system and the founder of the tradition of Russian religious philosophy. The son of the great historian Sergei Solovyov, he was a friend of Dostoevsky and a central figure in the intellectual life of his time. His work cast its shadow over the entire following generation — from Berdyaev and Bulgakov to Russian poetic Symbolism. ...

Whitehead Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was born in Ramsgate, Kent, and built a career on both sides of the Atlantic. For decades he taught mathematics and logic at Trinity College, Cambridge and at University College London, before accepting — at the age of sixty-three — an invitation to join the philosophy faculty at Harvard, where he produced his most ambitious metaphysical work. This dual trajectory, from mathematical rigour to cosmological speculation, defines his philosophy in a singular way: process thought does not emerge from a break with science but from a sustained philosophical meditation on its foundations. ...