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Tag: metaphysics

Pages tagged with metaphysics.

58 pages

• Aristotle

  Ancient Greek philosopher (384–322 BCE), student of Plato, founder of the Lyceum, author of the Organon (the syllogistic logic), Metaphysics, Physics, De anima, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Poetics, and the biological works. On the wiki,…

• Arthur Schopenhauer

  German post-Kantian philosopher (1788–1860) whose system — laid out in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818, expanded 1844) — articulates a metaphysics of the Will (the thing-in-itself underlying all phenomena), an ethics of compassion…

• Beständigung des Werdens in die Anwesenheit

  Heidegger's climactic thesis on the essence of will to power: it is the Beständigung des Werdens in die Anwesenheit — the making-stand-fast of becoming into abiding presence. The phrase appears at the close of Der Wille zur Macht als Erken…

• Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought

  Bergson's name (Chapter IV of Creative Evolution) for the structural way the human intellect falsifies movement and becoming: it extracts immobile snapshots ("views," vues) from the moving real and then recomposes movement by running the s…

• Creative Evolution Henri Bergson, 1907

  Author(s): Henri Bergson · Year: 1907 (trans. Donald A. Landes, Routledge 2023) · Type: book

• Creative Evolution (true vs. false evolutionism)

  Beyond the title of Bergson's book and the doctrine of the élan vital, "creative evolution" names a method and a thesis about reality: that evolution is a genuine creation of the unforeseeable, and that grasping it requires pursuing the th…

• Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens (1964) Martin Heidegger, 1964

  Author(s): Martin Heidegger Year: 1964 (this version: GA 14, 2007 — Klostermann edition with Heidegger's marginalia from his Handexemplar) Type: essay (originally Heidegger's contribution to the UNESCO Paris colloquium "Kierkegaard vivant,…

• Durée (Duration)

  Bergson's name for real, lived time: qualitative, continuous, indivisible, irreversible, and creative of the genuinely unforeseeable — "the continuous progression of the past, gnawing into the future and swelling up as it advances" (EC 7).…

• End of Philosophy (das Ende der Philosophie)

  Heidegger's late thesis: philosophy as metaphysics — from Plato through Hegel-Husserl-Nietzsche-Marx — has ended in the present age. The end is Vollendung, not cessation: a Versammlung in die äußerste Möglichkeit (gathering into outermost…

• Epinomis (The Philosopher) Plato (disputed — a dubium; scholarly consensus against Plato; ancient testimony attributes it to Philip of Opus, who also transcribed the Laws), c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato (disputed — a dubium; ancient testimony names Philip of Opus) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Richard D. McKirahan, Jr., Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Erregender Zwiespalt zwischen Wahrheit und Kunst

  The "agitating discord" between art and truth at the heart of Nietzsche's late metaphysics. Nietzsche himself names it in 1888: "Über das Verhältnis der Kunst zur Wahrheit bin ich am frühesten ernst geworden: und noch jetzt stehe ich mit e…

• Euthyphro Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• G. W. F. Hegel

  German philosopher (1770–1831). Author of the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; ingested as hegel-1807-phenomenology-spirit), the Wissenschaft der Logik (1812-16, with the Doctrine of Being revised 1831-32; all three volumes now ingested —…

• Haptocentrism

  Haptocentrism is Derrida's diagnostic name (coined in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2000, p. 52) for the philosophical tradition that privileges touch (Greek haphē) as the sense of immediacy, contact, presence, and self-relation — making tou…

• Henri Bergson

  French philosopher (1859-1941), Nobel laureate (1927), author of Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), Creative Evolution (1907), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), and Thought an…

• Homoiōsis Theōi (Becoming Like God)

  Homoiōsis theōi — "becoming like god so far as possible" (176b) — is the ethical telos Plato lodges, surprisingly, inside the epistemology of the Theaetetus. In the Digression (172c–177c) Socrates sets two lives against each other: the phi…

• Ideal Species and Ideation

  Investigation II's doctrine (husserl-1900-logical-investigations-vol1): universal objects — Species (Redness, the number Two, "the" triangle) — exist genuinely as ideal (timeless) objects, given in ideation, a founded act essentially diffe…

• Identität und Differenz (GA 11) Martin Heidegger, 2006

  Author: Martin Heidegger · Year: 2006 (GA edition; texts 1949–1963) · Editor: Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann · Type: book (Sammelband)

• Intellect, Instinct, Intuition

  In Creative Evolution Bergson treats intellect, instinct, and intuition not as three rungs of one ladder but as divergent directions of a single consciousness, differing in kind not in degree — "the major error, the one that has been passe…

• Interactive Ontology

  Caleb Faul's (2024) coined term for the metaphysical view his reading of Rothenberg's Three Heads through MP's institution-logic motivates. Things are neither static (complete all at once) nor self-contained (sealed off from interaction);…

• Laws Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Trevor J. Saunders, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Leitfrage and Grundfrage

  Heidegger's architectonic distinction between two questions of philosophy. The Leitfrage (guiding question) is "Was ist das Seiende?" — "What is the being?" — i.e., what makes a being a being? This question, given its decisive form by Aris…

• Machenschaft

  Heidegger's name for the mode of Being in the completed epoch of metaphysics — the form Seiendheit (beingness) takes when the Vollendung has installed Seinsverlassenheit (abandonment by Being) as the prevailing condition. Machenschaft is n…

• Material A Priori

  The doctrine minted in Investigation III §§11–12 (husserl-1901-logical-investigations-vol2): the sphere of essence divides into the formal — contentless categories "grouped round the empty notion of Something or Object as such" (Whole, Par…

• Metaphysische Grundstellung

  Heidegger's name for the structural form a metaphysical position takes within the Leitfrage-history. A Grundstellung is not a "viewpoint" or "doctrine" but the four-fold articulation by which a thinker takes a Stand (stance) within the una…

• More-than-Life

  Simmel's philosophical structure of life's self-transcendence: life produces, from its own energies, autonomous strata that exceed mere life — cognitive, religious, aesthetic, social, technical, normative — and these trans-vital strata ret…

• Nietzsche I Martin Heidegger, 1961

  Author(s): Martin Heidegger Year: 1961 (lectures: 1936/37, 1937, 1939; Vorwort: May 1961) Type: Lecture course (three courses; published Neske 1961, GA 6.1 ed. Brigitte Schillbach 1996)

• Nietzsche II Martin Heidegger, 1961

  Author(s): Martin Heidegger Year: 1961 (compositions: 1939, 1940, 1941, 1944-46; published Neske 1961, GA 6.2 ed. Brigitte Schillbach 1997) Type: Hybrid (lecture course + Abhandlungen + genealogical sketches + methodological meditation)

• Nihilism

  Nihilism is one of the corpus's most-cited terms and was, until now, one of its few un-homed HUB motifs — because three ingested traditions use the word for structurally different things. For Nietzsche, nihilism is the will to nothingness:…

• Nothingness as a Pseudo-Idea (Bergson)

  Bergson's sustained critique of the negative (Creative Evolution Chapters III–IV): the ideas of absolute Nothingness, of disorder, and of the unrealized possible are pseudo-ideas — they appear to have content but, examined, "destroy themse…

• Onto-Theo-Logik (Onto-Theo-Logic)

  The onto-theo-logical constitution (onto-theo-logische Verfassung) names the inner structural form of all metaphysics: because Being shows itself as Grund (ground), metaphysics is simultaneously Onto-logik (grounding beings in general as S…

• Parmenides Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Parts and Wholes (Fundierung)

  Investigation III's formal theory (husserl-1901-logical-investigations-vol2) — on Husserl's own account the presupposition of "all phenomenological investigations." Its cardinal distinction: parts divide into pieces (Stücke: parts independ…

• Peras and Apeiron (Limit and the Unlimited)

  The signature ontological pairing of Plato's Philebus (23c–27c): a division of "everything that exists now in the universe" into four kinds — the unlimited (apeiron), limit (peras), their mixture (mikton), and the cause of the mixture (ait…

• Phenomenology of Spirit Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 2018

  Author(s): Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) Year: 1807 (original); 2018 (Pinkard trans., Cambridge Hegel Translations) Type: book (Hegel's first published system; originally subtitled System der Wissenschaft. Erster Theil. Die Phä…

• Philebus Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE — one of the stylometrically secure "late" dialogues (Cooper, intro) — (trans. Dorothea Frede, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Piety (To Hosion / The Holy)

  Piety (to hosion / to eusebes — the holy, the pious, godliness) is the virtue the Euthyphro tries and fails to define. Located as "a part of justice — the part concerned with the care of the gods" (12e–13a), it is run through five definiti…

• Plato

  Athenian philosopher (427–347 BCE), founder of the Academy, and author of the dialogues that became — already in late antiquity — the central texts of philosophy as such (Cooper, Introduction). For this wiki he is primarily a latent ancest…

• Priority of Soul (the Laws X Argument for the Gods)

  In Book X of the Laws, Plato gives the corpus's fullest natural theology: the proof that the gods exist, grounded in the priority of soul over body. Soul is defined as self-moving motion — "the motion capable of moving itself" (896a), the…

• Republic Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• Schematisieren eines Chaos

  Nietzsche's account of knowledge, as read by Heidegger in Der Wille zur Macht als Erkenntnis (1939, heidegger-1961-nietzsche-i Part III): knowing is the schematizing of a chaos according to practical need. Knowledge is not correspondence t…

• Soul as Subject-Multiplicity

  Nietzsche's constructive critique of the subject in Beyond Good and Evil: the "I" of "I think" is a grammatical fiction, but the right response is not to abolish the soul — it is to re-engineer it as a plurality. §12 is decisive: the Chris…

• Symposium Plato, c. 4th c. BCE

  Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue

• The Allegory of the Cave

  The third and most famous of the Republic's images of the Good (514a–521b): prisoners chained since childhood face a wall on which shadows of carried artifacts are cast by a fire behind them; they take "the shadows of those artifacts" for…

• The Form of the Good

  The capstone of Plato's metaphysics in the Republic (504a–509c): the Form of the Good (to agathon) is "the most important thing to learn" (megiston mathēma, 505a), the source of both the being and the intelligibility of the Forms — and yet…

• The Ideal Genesis of Matter (détente / inversion)

  The metaphysical core of Creative Evolution Chapter III: Bergson's account of how intellectuality and materiality are engendered together from a higher "Consciousness in general," such that matter is the inversion-by-interruption of spirit…

• The Metaphysical in Man

  Merleau-Ponty's positive definition of metaphysics, developed primarily in the 1947 essay "The Metaphysical in Man" (Chapter 7 of Sense and Non-Sense, originally Revue de métaphysique et de morale July 1947). Metaphysics, for MP, is not me…

• Theory of Forms

  Plato's thesis that the truly real beings are Forms (eidē) — self-identical, invisible, unchanging realities such as "the Equal itself," "the Beautiful itself," "the Just itself" — of which sensible particulars are deficient, transient cop…

• Third Man Argument

  The most famous objection to the Theory of Forms, pressed by the aged Parmenides against young Socrates in Plato's Parmenides (132a–133a): positing one Form over many instances generates an unlimited regress of Forms. If many large things…

• Umdrehung des Platonismus

  Nietzsche's self-described project, recorded already in 1870/71: "Meine Philosophie umgedrehter Platonismus: je weiter ab vom wahrhaft Seienden, um so reiner schöner besser ist es. Das Leben im Schein als Ziel" (IX, 190). Heidegger reads t…

• Vollendung der Metaphysik

  Heidegger's name for what Nietzsche's thought is: not the overcoming of Western metaphysics but its completion. Vollendung is the most load-bearing thesis of the Nietzsche I lectures (1936-1939) and the operative frame for Heidegger's read…

• Wahrheit als Gerechtigkeit

  Nietzsche's most extreme determination of truth, in his late notebooks: truth as Gerechtigkeit — justice as the fitting bestowal of constancy by the will to power. Heidegger reads this in Nietzsche I Part III as "der äußerste Wandel der me…

• Will to Power

  Nietzsche's name for the essential character of reality: "the world is will to power, and that alone" (BGE 36). In Nietzsche's texts it names at once a psychological principle (drives seeking their discharge), a biological principle (life…

• William James

  American philosopher and psychologist (1842–1910), founder (with Peirce) of pragmatism and author of The Principles of Psychology (1890), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and Pragmatism (1907). In the wiki he enters as Bergson…

• Wissenschaft der Logik, Erster Band: Die Objective Logik (1812/1813) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1813

  Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · Year: 1812/1813 · Type: book

• Wissenschaft der Logik, Erster Theil: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832 revision) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1832

  Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · Year: 1832 · Type: book

• Wissenschaft der Logik, Zweiter Band: Die Subjective Logik oder Lehre vom Begriff (1816) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1816

  Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · Year: 1816 · Type: book

• Élan vital

  Bergson's name (introduced in Creative Evolution, 1907) for the original impetus of life: a single creative current that "passes from one generation of germs to the next," dividing itself among the divergent lines of evolution "without the…