Coakley: Metafysikk 1

Nå har forelesningene med Sarah Coakley begynnt. Dagens forelesning var mest introduksjon. Blir en meget spennende forelesningsrekke å følge. Forresten, hvis du er en av de 3 som gidder å lese disse notatene fremover og du ønsker å spørre Coakley om noe, er det bare å legge inn en kommentar, så kan jeg ta opp spørsmålet ved neste forelesning.

—

Thesis: ‘Metaphysics’ has become a slippery term. Sometimes it relates to all philosophical debates in which entities or categories ‘beyond the physical’ are appealed to; at others it is straightforwardly identified with ‘ontology’ (a theory of being as created by God). Kant’s critique of a naive continuation of speculative claims for knowledge of God (and the soul) is a defining moment in the history of Christian metaphysics. It can, however, be read in a number of ways. It can also be interpreted, in its significance for the continuation of the project of philosophically-defended theism, variously. This is what this lecture course is about.

• Either Kant can be the great hero: Where thought of God is psereved through Kant
• Or, he’s the appalling enemy (in Radical Orthodoxy), where he secularized reason and banished God.

The major problem: Is Kant the end of the road for the possibility of speculative knowledge of God, metaphysics, the soul etc? Or are there roads around and beyond him? The lecture series is going to look at replies to Kant.

I. The Problem of Definition

Compare contemporary approaches…

EJ Lowe (who died this week btw): Metaphysics is the study of the fundamental structure of reality.

Peter van Inwagen: Metaphysics is not like geology or tax law, cause it is the study of ultimate reality (he admits it doesn’t help much). It provides possible answers to three questions: What is the world like?Why is there a world at all? What is our place in the world? But it also asks subtle questions: What are the conditions with we can answer these questions? Metaphysics on this definition is not confined to ontology, but just as much concerned with the conditions of thought, judgment and interaction with the world (eg. what are time and space?).  Also concerned with categories, substances, relation, necessity etc.  And then again, metaphysics comes on to a theory of the person: free will, mind-brain etc

John Milbank: A different definition. There are only four types of metaphysics. (a) Plato and Aristotle: Theological realism.  (b) Scotist/ Occamist ontology, thinking about divine being and human will that starts with the Fransciscan movement.   Which allies possibilitilism with theological voluntarism. (c) A metaphysical realism that is non-theological (David Armstrong). Concerned with possible world. (d) Speculative materialism, of a neo-humean sort. (David Lewis etc)

.. with

1. Aristotle
   • What did he call that which came after physics? Books beta, gamma, kappa. Metaphysics was known for him as first philosophy, wisdom or theologia. It is just those questions that are discussed when you’re done with physics. It is not a sort of superscience that grounds all the empirical sciences. It’s not a self-contained body of knowledge.
   • It is rather a listing of topics left over.
   • • What kind of things might be?
     • What is the fundamental meaning of being?
     • Is the notion of being also the notion of intrinsic unity? Are all beings in a sense one being?
   • He rejected Plato’s theory of forms, there’s not a whole range of ontological beings of a different sort that explains the sensible reality. Aristotle thinks there are many different way of talking about unity, but all of them depend on one basic kind of being. Being is neither an attribute or a thing, and it cannot be described like a triangle can be described.
   • There is not some basic being underlying individual beings. But still, he wants to talk about Being, and Substance. And categories are attached to things that exists in this fundamental ontological sense.
   • There is a science that studies Being qua Being. He wants to suggest that Substances must be grasped as the first cause when the philosopher is a metaphysician.
   • Problem: Hasn’t he just told us that the theory of form is nonsense? Why then, is he probing behind individual entities, in order to find to on?
   • Problem:  He talks about a particular being which is an uncaused caused, an unmoved mover. This is not theology, but a cosmological theory. But this isn’t a regular being.
   • Analytic philosophers love him because he distinguishes between ways we use the language of being. Those who are committed to theological ontology are interested in what he says about the unmoved mover.
   • The most important thing to know is: Metaphysics is that which is left over after physics is discussed. And subsequently, the question is whether he things there is a fundamental category, Being, to be grasped.
2. Descartes (Sarah Commends Cottinghams work on Descartes)
   • The novelty of descartes is that no metaphysical assertion is to be believed except by the following decisions:
   • • Is must comform to a mathematical clarity.
     • Like maths, it cannot be doubted or it can be proved from postulates that can’t be doubted.
   • This is completely new. Metaphysics has been raised to the level of maths. So absolute mental clarity and deductive reason was the desideratum.
   • • Critics say there is a strong subject-centered element in his philosophy. He is insisting with a classic internalist epistemology that it’s by turning inwards that he is arriving at certainty.
   • Mind: His metaphysics is not anti-theological.
   • Btw, he thought one could only do very clear metaphysics once or twice a year. Metaphysical precision is a kind of vocation, it takes an enormous energy, a withdrawal from the daily life. This is almost religious element of his view of metaphysics
3. Leibniz (and Wolff)
   • Extends Descartes.
   • In principle, any truth can be given as a priory truth from the right perspective
   • • God has arranged everything as it is, and perfectly
   • We could establish that God exists, and once we’ve done that everything follows. God has arranged everything as it ought to be.
   • • Why is this problematic? What if God hasn’t order everything as perfectly as it can be?
     • Thus, when everything is understood rightly, everything is a tautology: It is just given.
4. Hume
   • This is the opposite of Leibniz: An skeptical anti-metaphysics.
   • What we have are sense impressions, mental images, and we learn how to negotiate the would through repetition.
   • There is no causality as such in Hume. (ironically this is the one area Leibniz and Hume agree: Hume thinks its just repetition.)
   • Rejects God on empirical and rational grounds.
5. Kant
   • In Kant’s early career he was immersed in speculative thought. (reading Leibniz through Wolff). This is what he comes out of. But also out of Hume, when he discovers what’s going on in Britain.
   • (Read the introduction to the second edition to the first critique)
   • First move: Kant wants to follow the ambition of Descartes and Leibniz to put metaphysics on a solid scientific base, but in light of the critique of Hume.
   • Second move: We must move from the notion that our knowledge is about object out there, to the notion that objects conform to our cognition. But we do have an a priori structure.
   • Third move: What won’t work is an a priori knowledge of everything in the world.
   • Fourth move: He’s going to look for a form of a priori to which experience is conformed in order that we can have true knowledge of the world. A synthetic a priori.
   • Now, where does that leave God and the soul?
   • • God is not longer an object of knowledge. But a regulative idea, crucial to reason, but in a different category, in the moral realm. We cannot have knowledge of regulative ideas, but we do have to posit them.

II: Counteracting Kant? What are the Options?

(a). People who are renewing the Kantian project:

• McKinnon did it at a time Kantianism was extremely unpopular. It helped and sustained the notion of God in a period of reductive logical positivism.
• Since then, if you see Kant as having continuing potential, you can follow John Hare at Yale who has taken up Kant’s moral thought, or someone as Roger Scruton, who through his argument about the aesthetic whishes to continue from the third critique. (Recent gifford lectures. The existence of the beautiful, constitutes a truly rational way to argue for the existence of God)
• It’s still a minority agenda.

In the post-kantian meltdown in protestant theology, the two major responses that are made (that accept Kant’s argument against metaphysics), are:

(b) The turn inwards: religious ‘feeling’ instead of metaphysical speculation (Schleiermacher)

He places the authority in feeling. It’s not an anti-philosophical argument, but its a way of getting around the problem. Where religiosity really lies is in feeling

(c) Barth as the ‘soft underbelly’ of a Kantian hegemony: revelation instead of metaphysics.

He just assumes that you would never start with a proof for the existence of God. He goes around the authority problem, by asserting authority through revelation. Note how Kantian Barth is.

(d) The existential turn and the purging of idolatrous Western ‘metaphysics’ (Heidegger) – God as ‘gift beyond Being’ (Marion)

Even worse news for the believer: Not only is Kant right, but the whole Western tradition has asked the wrong questions. New answers to Kant.

(e) The turn to religious language rather than metaphysical speculation (Wittgenstein)

How to sustain the religious language game. He reject the Kantian need for a transcendental ground for knowledge. You just continuing playing the games.

(f) The probabilistic evidentialism as a new case for God (Swinburne)

A direct riposte: An insistence that Kant was wrong. Because science has moved on. And if we look at them in a probabilistic mode (rather than deductive)

(g) ‘Proper basicality’  as a mean of re-establishing God (Wolterstorff, Plantinga)

Why can’t we just say that that belief is just as basic as any other? We don’t have to argue for God, we just have to analyze the condition under which we trust our knowledge and argue that the idea of God is just as basic as any of the other things we believe

(h) Re-thinking the status of arguments for God’s existence (including revised Thomism)

Yes, arguments for the existence of God can work. Not like Swinburne, but just sees the arguments leading us to the mystery of God.

(i) Admitting defeat I, ‘a la Kant (‘liberals’: e.g. Hick, Kaufman)

A pragamatist post-kantianism

(j) Admitting defeat II, a la Heidegger (post-metaphysical theology. e.g. Caputo)

One cannot answer Kant and Heidegger. But there are ways in which we still must sense mystical traces in the world and respond to them.