Metaphysics - Renaissance to the Present - The Renaissance (1433–1617), The Early Modern Period (1561–1753), Final Causes, Kant's "copernican Revolution" In Metaphysics
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Metaphysics, in its most basic sense, is an account of what exists. It may include accounts of what sorts of things exist; of what really exists as opposed to what merely appears to exist; of what exists necessarily rather than by accident; of what it is that underlies everything else; or of the most general laws governing existing things. This article will describe some of the most important metaphysical positions that have appeared since the Renaissance and, where space permits, some of the reasons that have motivated the philosophers who hold them. The dates given for different eras are particular to this discussion. They name the year of birth of the earliest philosopher covered in each section and the year of death of the latest.
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Better and more widely available texts of the writings of Plato mark the Renaissance. The new, widespread distribution of Platonic and Neoplatonic works, due in large part to the work of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) led to a major revival of those views. One of Ficino's most influential views is his account of a hierarchy of perfection among existing things in which the highest thing,…
Early modern metaphysics is in large part a response to the challenges that dramatic advances in physics and astronomy presented for theology and Aristotelian philosophy. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is the figure who perhaps best marks the transition between Renaissance and early modern philosophy. Bacon's major work, The New Organon, as its title suggests, was an attempt to supplant A…
[The mind] falls back on things that are more familiar, namely final causes, which are plainly derived from the nature of man rather than of the universe, and from this origin have wonderfully corrupted philosophy. (Bacon, 1620, p. 44) When dealing with natural things we will, then, never derive any explanations from the purposes which God or nature may have had in view when creating them and we s…
German idealists attempted to preserve causal laws and other necessary truths about objects by emphasizing the role of the self in understanding objects. As the movement developed, figures such as Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) went further, arguing that, in a sense, the self creates objects. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in his Critique of Pure Reason, defended the view, largely against H…
Kant himself rejected metaphysics, considered as an attempt to know objects outside experience. Forms of that position characterized three major recent philosophical movements that drew on his emphasis on the thinking self and his devotion to empiricism. [Pragmatism] will serve to show that almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish,—one word being d…
[Pragmatism] will serve to show that almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish,—one word being defined by other words, and they by still others, without any real conception ever being reached,—or else is downright absurd. (Peirce, "What Pragmatism Is") The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values.&…
It is difficult to predict the debates and positions for which the early twenty-first century era will be remembered. A result of the focus on language and meaning produced by logical positivism is perhaps that many important metaphysical debates at the beginning of the twenty-first century have centered not on the question of what existence is or is like generally but on the question of whether p…
Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Carnap, Rudolf. Philosophy and Logical Syntax. Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press, 1996. This most recent edition is out of print. The work is widely available online. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 3 vols. Translated by John Cottingham, Ro…
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