Title: Relative Unity in an Undone World: Paraconsistence and the Meaning of Being
Abstract: Men die because they cannot join the beginning to the end. Alcmaeon of Croton I Intelligibility and its discontents. Many in contemporary philosophy are eager to distance themselves from the intellectual, moral, political, and theological commitments of once authoritative predecessors. Better to pursue what matters now, never mind the historical curiosities that may have moved so many. Theirs was a different time. The past for them is something to be sloughed off. But setting the past as far as possible from the present is not the only option. Graham Priest, who consistently looks to historical traditions and figures for help resolving contemporary philosophical puzzles, demonstrates how long-ago forbears alternatively inspire numinous insights today or conspire with tempting invitations from beyond the grave to repeat the same stubborn oversights they inflicted on their own day. Priest's last monograph, (1) to its credit, raises a basic question, perhaps the basic question, about metaphysical unity: What is it that makes something what it is? With arguments trading in classical, medieval, modern, and contemporary idioms, Priest contends the unity of something, that by which it is one thing at all, is assumed rather than proven in the history of philosophy. Unity is taken for granted. It is a foregone conclusion, granted a key one, on the basis of which all kinds of provocative subsequent philosophical reasoning takes place. Unified entities must come first so philosophers' arguments about them can come second. Priest's main task in his previous works as well as in his latest one is to expose this conclusion for what he takes it to be, both something much more optional than its advocates assume and thus something much more urgently in need of philosophical justification. Things are given to us in time as unities to sense, to imagine, to investigate, and to represent in innumerable ways, whether practical, artistic, scientific, or philosophical. Each of these ways works, each takes place, only when a prior unification is already achieved. But how is such a feat actually accomplished? Why is there unity to anything? In Priest's estimation these and other related questions must have been neglected for the history of philosophy to proceed as it has. He wants us to pay attention to a problem that tends to elude direct, sustained scrutiny. The world and the things within it must be unified so the philosophical arguments and concepts about it and them may occur in meaningful ways. The means by which entities' obvious oneness is achieved remains mysterious, and it is this long-lost background operation of metaphysical unification Priest claims finally to have discovered. Priest's new book does not only repeat previous works' hard-won conclusions. It brings them together for the first time. It unifies them. Like the historical sources from which Priest draws, One stages a form-content problem at a very high level. But the newfound unity at the level of his arguments about formal logic's place in philosophical argument, about dialetheic logic's place in formal logic, about Western methods of thinking and their relations to Eastern philosophical and religious practices, taken together seems to be what Priest wants to contribute to the conversation most. Taken singly these are not unfamiliar terrain for the author. His previous works endorse the same positions and at times rehearse the same strategies of argument. The main idea here, though, is to unify these components, casting them as subroutines inside a wider array, so as to argue the following: unity is both necessary and neglected as a metaphysical principle, an unwarranted assumption both on the side of the entities that compose the universe and on the side of the metaphysician who poses questions about them, which makes his own account of unity, his positive contribution, essential to the philosophical study of basic reality. …
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-06-07
Language: en
Type: article
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