Una concepción pragmatista sobre las reglas

La defensa de la normatividad del significado ha derivado en el debate sobre la prioridad metafísica de las reglas o del significado (cfr. Glüer & Wikforss, 2018). Sin embargo, la defensa de la prioridad de las reglas no es más que una variante del intelectualismo y, por ende, está sujeta a las mismas críticas que éste, mientras que la defensa de la prioridad del significado deja sin respuesta a la pregunta metasemántica ¿cómo es qué el lenguaje es significativo? Una concepción pragmatista sobre las reglas permite superar el debate evitando el intelectualismo y proporcionando una respuesta a la pregunta metasemántica. Defending the normativity of meaning has led to the debate about the metaphysical priority either or rules or meaning (cfr. Glüer & Wikforss, 2018). On the one hand, defending priority of rules is just a variant of intellectualism and, therefore, it is subject to the same criticisms. On the other hand, defending priority of meaning leaves unanswered the meta-semantic question: how is it that language is significant? A pragmatic conception of rules makes it possible to overcome the debate by avoiding intellectualism and providing an answer to the meta-semantic question.

Aristotelian Priority, Metaphysical Definitions of God and Hegel on Pure Thought as Absolute

This paper advances a philosophical interpretation of Hegel's Logic as defending a metaphysics, which includes an absolute, itself comparable to God in other systems of metaphysics of interest to Hegel, including Aristotle's and Spinoza's. Two problems are raised which can seem to block the prospects for such a metaphysically inflationary interpretation. The key to resolving these problems is consideration of the kinds of metaphysical priority that Hegel sees in Aristotle. This allows us to build a philosophical model of Hegel's absolute, and to demonstrate how the model fits the argument of Hegel's Logic. Application of this model provides a philosophical explanation of the senses in which Hegel's metaphysics is idealist; he argues that thought is absolute and comparable to God in other systems of metaphysics: thought is both self-determining and metaphysically prior to being.

Modal Structuralism and Theism

Drawing an analogy between modal structuralism about mathematics and theism, this chapter offers a structuralist account that implicitly defines theism in terms of three basic relations: logical and metaphysical priority, and epistemic superiority. On this view, statements like “God is omniscient” have a hypothetical and a categorical component. The hypothetical component provides a translation pattern according to which statements in theistic language are converted into statements of second-order modal logic. The categorical component asserts the logical possibility of the theism structure on the basis of uncontroversial facts about the physical world. This structuralist reading of theism preserves objective truth-values for theistic statements while remaining neutral on the question of ontology. Thus, it offers a way of understanding theism to which a naturalist cannot object, and it accommodates the fact that religious belief, for many theists, is an essentially relational matter.

From Objectivity to the Absolute Idea in Hegel’s Logic

The topic of this chapter is the difficult conclusion of Hegel’s Science of Logic, concerning what Hegel calls ‘Objectivity’ and the ‘Absolute Idea’. It is argued that there are two keys to finding Hegel’s argument and its philosophical strengths. First, Hegel takes a kind of metaphysics as basic to philosophy. Second, Hegel aims to support an ambitious metaphysics, but not (as is sometimes thought) a form of metaphysical monism; rather, Hegel argues that there is something with absolute metaphysical priority, but this is something that must be realized in something with less metaphysical priority. This is what Hegel means by the frequent refrain that the absolute cannot be a beginning, but must come at the end. The advantages of this metaphysical interpretive approach are compared with competing advantages of others, including an approach by means of a comparison with the deductions from the Transcendental Analytic of Kant’s first Critique.

Back to the Present

McTaggart's famous argument that the A-series is contradictory is vitiated by an unsatisfactory conceptualization of tenses which can be corrected by making explicit their relational structure. This leads into a much sharper formulation of his apparent contradiction, and defusing this apparent contradiction requires a careful distinction between tensed and tenseless descriptions of thoughts. As a result the ‘unreality’ of tense turns out to rest on the fact that tensed descriptions of temporal facts do not capture their identity. This ‘metaphysical’ priority of tenseless over tensed descriptions of time is, however, counterbalanced by an ‘epistemological’ priority of tensed thoughts over tenseless thoughts: a conception of tense which requires a form of self-consciousness turns out to be an essential ingredient of rational thought.