Spanish and Latin American Metaphysics

Peter of Spain

Logic

• From the 13th to the 17th century in Europe, logic, as one of seven liberal arts, formed part of the core of university education

• The standard textbook taught in the universities, which went through 166 editions, was the Tractatus, also known as the Summulae Logicales, of Peter of Spain

Scholasticism

• Peter of Spain became a leading emblem of Scholasticism, the method of dialectical reasoning that dominated medieval universities

The Scholastic Method

• Examine a question or a work by a significant author

• Survey various approaches to the issue• Find points of disagreement among

these sources• Use logic and the analysis of language

to resolve the dispute, ideally by reconciling the views and revealing a deeper agreement

Tractatus

• The Tractatus devotes five books to the “old logic” of Aristotle: – Parts of speech– Propositions– Syllogisms– Topics of argumentation– Aristotle’s categories– Essential and accidental properties

New Logic

• The remaining seven books concern the “new logic,” the logic of terms and the theory of supposition that was a major innovation of the 12th and 13th centuries.

The Theory of Supposition

• To understand the structure of the world in its broadest outlines, we need to understand the structure of language

• To analyze the structure of language, we must distinguish – complex expressions, which have other

expressions as components, from – simple expressions, which do not

• We break down complex expressions into their simple components

Terms

• Some simple terms, such as not, if, of, such, as, and the like, are syncategorematic: They organize language but themselves refer to nothing in the world

• Others, including proper names and common nouns, are categorematic; they refer to substances or things of other categories

Ontological Commitment

• We can understand what there must be in the world by – analyzing categorematic terms and – seeing what their use commits us to

Semantics and Ontology

• Peter ‘s central idea is that metaphysics rests on semantics, the theory of meaning

• To find out what there is in the world, – analyze language, – understand what it means, and – see what objects have to exist for what you

say about the world to be true

Peter’s Ontology

• Peter’s own metaphysical stance is fairly neutral

• His theory of supposition holds that – proper names stand for objects and that – common nouns stand either for a kind of object or

for the individual objects falling under them

• He commits himself, in other words, to what Aristotle would call primary and secondary substances: individual objects and kinds

Universals

• The status of the other categories formed the topic of one of medieval philosophy’s central debates:

• Are universals (qualities, relations, etc.) real?

• If so, are they mind-dependent or mind-independent?

• Peter himself offers no response

Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)

Ortega v. Idealism

• Ortega begins from the dispute between realists and idealists

• Idealists contend that everything is mind-dependent; the world is a mental construction

• Ortega finds this view unsatisfying; there are hard realities we confront that are not of our own making

Ortega v. Realism

• But he finds realism unappealing as well

• Realists maintain that some things are independent of mind

• This, Ortega believes, isolates mind from world and makes it impossible to understand how knowledge is possible

Mind and World

• Ortega insists that mind and world are intertwined

• The world cannot be understood without appeal to our own cognitive faculties

• But we cannot understand ourselves without appeal to the world

• Contextualism: “I am myself and my circumstance.”

Vital Reason

• I and my circumstances together constitute life

• Reason can come to reliable conclusions only when it focuses on life, taking both mind and world, both subject and object, into account

• This is vital reason, which is historical, for we cannot understand ourselves or our circumstances without understanding how they have come about

Bounded Freedom

• Ortega’s thought is contextualist, historical, and dynamic

• We frequently encounter our own limitations, imposed in part by aspects of the world not of our own making

• We are free to choose who we are, but that freedom is bounded

• Our lives are dramas in which our freedom confronts those boundaries

Ortega’s Perspectivism

• Ortega’s perspectivist view of truth is not Nietzsche’s, which, he says, threatens to collapse into relativism

• Ortega thinks of describing a landscape—a house, say, surrounded by trees

• No one perspective on the scene captures it completely

• Yet no view is arbitrary or merely a mental construction

Perspectives

Perspectives

• We might identify the truth about the house and trees with the totality of all possible perspectives on them

• But that totality is not itself a perspective

• There is no place to stand from which one can see the house from all possible points of view at once

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

Tlön• “Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments

did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language- religion, letters, metaphysics- all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts.”

The Heresy of Materialism

• “On Tuesday, X crosses a deserted road and loses nine copper coins. On Thursday, Y finds in the road four coins, somewhat rusted by Wednesday's rain. On Friday, Z discovers three coins on the road. On Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor of his house.”

The Heresy of Materialism

• “The heresiarch would deduce from this story the reality— i.e., the continuity— of the nine coins which were recovered. It is absurd (he affirmed) to imagine that four of the coins have not existed between Tuesday and Thursday, three between Tuesday and Friday afternoon, two between Tuesday and Friday morning. It is logical to think they have existed-- at least in some secret way, hidden from the comprehension of men-- at every moment of those three periods.”

Missing Explanation Argument

• Realism explains our experiences• Maybe the idealist is right• Suppose everything were mind-dependent• Why are there regularities in my

experiences? Why does your experience align with mine?

• Realism explains this• Idealism has no explanation

Missing Explanation Argument

• There are regularities in our experiences of the world

• In similar circumstances you and I have similar experiences

• The realist has a simple explanation: we see the same thing

• The idealist has no such explanation • Why do our experiences follow similar patterns?

Best Explanation Argument

• Realism is the simplest explanation of our experiences

• Suppose the idealist is right• Suppose things don’t exist, or obey natural

laws when we aren’t looking• But it’s simpler to suppose they do

Idealism’s Triumph

• The story of Tlön gradually leaks out on earth, and people become more and more fascinated with the planet on which everything is orderly, everything is mental, and nothing has any independent existence

• Idealism slowly begins to dominate the thinking of this world

• Fiction drives out reality