This paper examines Aristotle’s notion of priority with the specific aim of capturing the sort of priority that characterizes the primacy of substances in his metaphysics. I reject the traditional interpretation, which understands the ontological priority of substances in terms of independent existence. But there are rather two sorts of priority: the ontological priority of substances should be understood in terms of completeness, whereas the ontological priority of “substances-of-something” (the essences) is a causal-explanatory priority. Furthermore, an important piece of Aristotle’s (...) argument against Platonism is that these two sorts of priority – namely, the completeness priority and the causal-explanatory priority – should be kept distinct. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to describe in some detail the actual relationship between Charles S. Peirce and Alfred N. Whitehead, paying particular attention to the Peircean notions of science and metaphysics, with the conviction that this contrast can help to understand better the scope and depth of C. S. Peirce’s thought.

Showing che importance of art dialectic to science is attempted in this article, at the same time a confusion between them is avoided. To this aim fist, a bríef vision of the characters of science is offered. Then, the essentials characters of dialectic and its divers uses are examined. As a conclusion, it tries to bring to light how the dialectic technique, without giving scientific knowledge at all, is an essential scientific tool.

A critical survey of topics that play a central role in contemporary analytic ontology and metaphysics, including, identity, persistence through time, the problem of universals, the notion of ontological commitment, and the boundary between semantic issues and metaphysics proper.

Unlike being as act of being, being as true does not seem to belong to the object of metaphysics but only to that of logic. However, according to Aquinas it has a greater extension and universality than the act of being (and it is well konwn that universality is a characteristic of the object of metaphysics). For whereas being as act of being is a passio entis, namely a property of things, being as true is, according to Aquinas (and Frege), (...) a passio enuntiationis, that is a property of propositions, including (true) propositions about negations and non-being, such as ‘non-being is non-being’. Being as true is expressed in terms of ‘it is the case that p’ or ‘it is true that p’, where p can be any (true) proposition. Being as true is made most clearly evident in the affirmative answer to a question, when we say ‘(sic) est’, where ‘est’ refers to the whole proposition put in question, and intends to express the existence of a relation between the content of the proposition and reality, which is in fact the truth. (shrink)

Historically, in Aesthetics, auratic object turned toward the study of the sensibilia and of the acts of perception, of imagination and of memory. Among the sensibilia that offer themselves to be apprehended by subjects and cultural communities, some objects of symbolic value have taken here on a special role: artworks. If it is not possible to build a unified canon of Art that is universally accepted as valid, aura is in Art the link between the symbol’s power of allusion and (...) a symbolic idea of form. This symbolic idea of form has the visible and the invisible always simultaneously present and mediated. The artistic “form” is not a mimetic image, but it is, as Kant will say, an aesthetic idea not reducible to the word.So, when Merleau-Ponty writes about the eye and visibility, he shows how painting is an “interrogation” of the invisible through the visible: but this interrogation always begins with a unitary body, with the «delirious and secret genesis of the aspects of our body».We can then conclude that the artistic auratic object bring us beyond the “illusionism” of vision, back to the “metaphysical” significance of artistic image: to an invisible Being made of contingencies, reversibility, of living and lived bodies. Here, the “form” of objects is inseparable from the “total experience” of our embodied senses: our perception is the capacity to unite all of our sensory experiences into a “single auratic world”. (shrink)

Este trabajo discute varias formulaciones diferentes del principio de causalidad considerando la función que tales principios pueden cumplir en argumentos cosmológicos. Se argumenta que el principio se comprende mejor como requiriendo una causa para todos los estados de cosas contingentes, en vez de requiriendo una explicación para todas las proposiciones verdaderas contingentes. Se argumenta, también, que el requerimiento de una causa para un estado de cosas no debe ser visto como el requerimiento de algo que hace necesaria la ocurrencia del (...) efecto. Varias dificultades bien conocidas pueden ser evitadas con causas que no hacen necesarias sus producciones. Se argumenta, luego, que en las teorías combinatorias de la modalidad, donde todo puede existir con o sin cualquier otro existente diferente, las formulaciones fuertes del principio de causalidad parecen falsas, pero las formulaciones débiles, donde sólo se postula una causa posible para todo estado de cosas, parecen verdaderas. Por otro lado, tanto las formulaciones fuertes como las débiles parecen verdaderas en las concepciones causales de la modalidad. Sin embargo, en las teorías causales de la modalidad la fase II del argumento cosmológico resulta mucho más difícil, esto es, parece mucho más complicado justificar que el objeto concreto necesario al que se hace referencia es omnisciente, omnipotente y moralmente perfecto. This work discusses several different formulations of the principle of causality considering the function that those principles might play in cosmological arguments. It is argued that the principle is best understood as requiring a cause for all contingent states of affairs, instead of as requiring an explanation for all contingent true propositions. It is also argued that the requirement of a cause for a state of affairs should not be seen as the requirement for something that necessitates the effect. Several well-known difficulties haunting the principle can be avoided with non-necessitating causes. It is then argued that in combinatorial theories of modality, where everything can exist with or without any other different existent, the strong formulations of the principle of causality seem false, but the weak formulations, where only a possible cause for every contingent state of affairs is postulated, seem true. On the other hand, both strong and weak formulations of the principle seem true on the causal conceptions of modality. Nevertheless, in causal theories of modality phase II of the cosmological argument turns out to be much more difficult, i. e., it seems much harder to justify that the necessary concrete object referred to is omniscient, omnipotent and morally perfect. (shrink)

In delineating the idea of a teleological accord between theoretical possibility and practical reality of the supersensual, between what reason may think and what it gives the order to create, the postulates of pure practical reason become the voice of the eminently architectural sense of metaphysics as a science in which reason ultimately confronts herself, in a dialogue on whose success it wagers nothing less than the survival of its internal consistency, that is to say brings into play its very (...) nature as reason. (shrink)