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.
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- 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.
- 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.
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- 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.
- 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:
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- 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.
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- 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
- Leibniz (and Wolff)
- Extends Descartes.
- In principle, any truth can be given as a priory truth from the right perspective
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- 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.
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- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
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- 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.
- 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.