The Review of Metaphysics

This paper argues that inertia is an inherent principle and that inertia and Newton’s First Law are in this way natural in the Aristotelian sense.  Indeed, many difficulties concerning inertia and the First Law of Motion may be resolved by understanding them through an Aristotelian conception of nature.  The paper proceeds by examining the characteristic activities of inertia, the Aristotelian idea of nature, various accounts of inertia as force and as inert, and the manner in which an Aristotelian conception of nature improves on these accounts.  It concludes that the unsuccessful attempts by physicists to find an extrinsic origin of inertia, though they may eventually lead to new discoveries, support the view that inertia is an inherent principle of nature.  Newton himself understood the principle of inertia through an eclectic but largely nonAristotelian conception of nature and matter and by the problematic notion of a vis inertiae.   However, Newton’s general philosophy of nature should be distinguished from the more specific content of the First Law and of inertia itself.  A general Aristotelian conception of nature can resolve many of Newton’s difficulties.  Thus, inertia and the First Law of Motion are reasonably regarded as natural in the general Aristotelian sense.

Kant’s essay An answer to the question: What is Enlightenment? has developed into the representative text of philosophical Enlightenment in the course of the past two hundred years.  Yet most interpretations tend to assign to it a univocal meaning that is incompatible with its apparent polysemy.  While taking the latter into account, the author closely investigates Kant’s essay and offers a balanced interpretation of its meaning.  On the basis of this reading, it becomes apparent that we should understand Kant’s idea of the enlightenment process in a normative sense.  As a result, the emphasis in the text shifts from a historico-philosophical promise of an “Enlightened Age” to the view of a precarious, risky “Age of Enlightenment” which Kant claims to live in.  There is ample textual evidence that Kant wanted to intervene with this essay by cherishing the hope for more enlightenment.

This paper argues that Husserl’s ethics do not fit into any one of three commonly recognized kinds of ethical theory: virtue (Aristotelian), deontological (Kantian), and consequentialist (especially, utilitarianism).  Husserl’s mature ethical theory, in particular, combines a modern, Kantian or Fichtean approach based on a strong concept of a free and active ego capable of shaping its life autonomously through its own will with a more Aristotelian theory of the virtues that help us to shape our lives in order to reach happiness or eudaimonia.  The paper presents a historical overview of Husserl’s writings on ethics, divided into two main periods with distinct emphases.  It concludes that, on the one hand, Husserl’s theory of the ethical person clarifies the origin of the virtues in the free activity of the subject, and on the other, it extends the voluntaristic conception of subjectivity to encompass the passively constituted habits.  In this way, Husserl combines an Aristotelian-style virtue ethics with modern theories of subjectivity.  It is this combination of modern and Aristotelian elements in Husserl’s ethics that makes it a systematically fruitful and promising contribution to ethical theory.

Whitehead’s process metaphysics, as developed in Process and Reality, is harmed by the incoherence of his notion of eternal objects as timeless and essentially unrelated entities, which therefore need a primordial agent as their ontological ground and the source of their relatedness and relevance. Such nontemporal entities undermine what is supposed to be a thoroughly temporalist metaphysics. Eternal objects can be understood solely as functions of Creativity, however, as features of a purely temporal process. A notion of God is not required. Whitehead’s Categoreal Obligations specify the necessary conditions for this process, including how the novelty is possible that is needed to account for temporal change and the increased complexity that value enhancement presupposes and makes possible. Adventures of Ideas, especially through the notions of Art and Peace, develops at the level of human civilization this same secular interpretation of the capacity of entities to fashion novel and progressive outcomes.

This essay examines the connection between the concept of autonomy and the concept of an ideal, moral self in Kant’s practical philosophy. Its central thesis is that self-legislation does not rest on the capacity to exempt oneself from nature’s causal network. Instead, it rests on the practical capacity for identification with what Kant calls an individual’s “moral personality.” A person’s ability to identify with this morally ideal version of himself gives shape to his will, enabling him to decide how to act on the basis of reasons that do not stem from desires or inclinations. It thus makes possible a form of volition that is autonomous rather than heteronomous.

This paper responds to an argument of Hilary Putnam to the effect that the plurality of modern sciences shows us that any natural kind has a plurality of essences.  In the past, he has argued that no system of representations, mental or linguistic, could have an intrinsic relationship to the world.  Though he has granted that the Thomistic notion of form and its application to the identity of concepts may avoid these earlier objections, he has maintained that the advance of the sciences has shown us that there are too many substantial forms in any particular kind of thing to provide the unity of conceptual identity required by the Thomist’s account.  Given the resemblance of Putnam’s position to the “pluralists” against whom Aquinas argued in the Summa Theologiae a consideration of Aquinas arguments is undertaken.  Following this, the paper examines a particular case of recent scientific practice, in order to suggest whose position, Putnam’s or the Thomist’s, more adequately captures the practice of the natural sciences of today, and their bearing upon the metaphysical question of the nature of essence in natural kinds.  The paper concludes that the Thomist position on the unity of form or essence, with qualifications made about distinct conceptual approaches to some object of investigation, and the use of analogy in sorting through these distinct approaches, is better capable of accounting for the actual goals and practices of scientific understanding as we see it practiced today than is Putnam’s transcendental nominalism and neopragmatism.

Gordon P. Barnes has recently argued that presence by power is inadequate as an explanation of the way elements are present in complex bodies, and that it would be better to explain the elements’ presence by claiming that simpler substances—carbon atoms, for example—are actually and substantially present in living things.  In order to address his arguments, this paper begins by briefly presenting St. Thomas’s understanding of presence by power, and then argues that Barnes’s proposal—that there is a multiplicity of substantial forms in one matter—is unsatisfactory.  First, the paper explains why the scientific facts do not require a plurality of substantial forms. Second, it shows how Barnes’s theory does not adequately explain living things. Third, it argues against Barnes’s claim that St. Thomas’s explanation is insufficient because it denies "the universal causality of nature."

This paper considers the issue of cryopreservation and the definition of death from an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective.  A central conceptual focus throughout this discussion is the purportedly irreversible nature of death and the criteria by which a human body is considered to be informed by a rational soul.  It concludes that a cryopreserved corpse fails to have “life potentially in it” sufficient to satisfy Aristotle’s definition of ensoulment.  Therefore, if the possibility that such a corpse may be successfully preserved and resuscitated comes to fruition, one would have to conclude that the person’s rational soul, which had separated from its body at death, has literally reanimated its resuscitated body. Obviously, this conclusion has theological implications that go beyond the scope of this discussion if we regard bodily resuscitation in this manner as a form of technologically induced resurrection.  Another apparent implication of the paper’s argument is that, in a limited sense, death loses its irreversible nature.

The concern of this paper is to relate the moral philosophy of Hutcheson with a traditional point of view, according to which moral philosophy depends on natural theology.  The analysis of this relationship is important because it is a crucial feature of the Hutchesonian moral philosophy.  However, this theological outlook does not entirely match his empirical moral epistemology, and this inconsistency allowed David Hume and Adam Smith to throw aside the theological foundation, taking from Hutcheson only the empirical aspects of his epistemology.  The intention of this paper is to explain why this theological outlook cannot match a moral epistemology which lacks a metaphysical foundation.

This paper presents a reflection upon Plato’s good that surpasses even being.  It looks for parallels between Western and Asian sources and examines aspects of Pierce and Whitehead’s  philosophy in some detail.  Ultimately, it attempts to vindicate metaphysics from accusations of death.