The Conceptual Structure Of Reality

The Conceptual Structure of Reality

This book describes a novel conception of reality, one that uniquely incorporates an idealistic view of existence with an account of objectivity. It introduces a general model of conceptual analysis and demonstrates its effectiveness in exposing and establishing the existence of conceptual ties. The book begins by introducing the tools and principles needed for the conceptual analysis undertaken in chapters that follow. Next, it presents a detailed examination into existence, contingency, idealism, self-consciousness and natural laws. In the process, the author critically examines the conceptions of existence held by Kant, Frege and Russell; argues that the determinations of past, present and future are subjective in the sense that they imply the existence of consciousness in relation to which they are fixed; shows that every possible reality includes sufficient conditions for self-consciousness; and confronts the question of the "uniformity of nature," which states that reality is subject to natural laws. In the end, the idealistic conception of reality developed in this book implies that existence is relative, rather than absolute, in the sense that it is determined in relation to a point of view internal to reality. This view of existence implies that reality necessarily exists.

The Conceptual Structure of Reality

Idealism in Modern Philosophy

This book tells the story of idealism in modern philosophy, from the seventeenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann define idealism as the reduction of all reality to something mental in nature. Rather than distinguishing between metaphysical and epistemological versions of idealism, they distinguish between metaphysical and epistemological motivations for idealism. They argue that while metaphysical arguments for idealism have only rarely been accepted, for example by Bishop Berkeley in the early eighteenth century and the British idealists Bradley and McTaggart in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, epistemological arguments for idealism have been widely accepted, even in the so-called analytic philosophy of the twentieth century. Guyer and Horstmann discuss many philosophers who have played a role in the development of idealism, from Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, through Kant; the German idealists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; the British and American idealists such as Green and Royce in addition to Bradley and McTaggart; G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, Neo-Kantians such as Ernst Cassirer; and twentieth-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Collingwood, Carnap, Sellars, and McDowell.