Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality

Bibliographic Data

ID19001077
AuthorsThomas Hofweber (0000-0001-7095-6559, Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill., corresponding author)
Year2023
Publication date2023-02-23
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueIdealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressOxford (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780198823636.001.0001
OpenAlexW4321603396
Open LibraryOL39963467M
ISBN9780198823636
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited32

Do human beings have a special and distinguished place in reality? In this book Thomas Hofweber defends that they do. We are special, since there is an intimate connection between our human minds and reality itself. Hofweber thus defends a form of idealism, in particular one which holds that our human minds constrain, but do not construct, reality as the totality of facts. Reality as the totality of facts is thus not independent of our minds, and our minds play a metaphysically special role in all of reality. But reality as the totality of things is taken to be completely independent of us. The proposed form of idealism – conceptual idealism – is formulated via the notion of a harmony between our minds and reality. And that this harmony obtains is defended from considerations in the philosophy of language. A good part of the book is concerned with how it could possibly be that one can defend a metaphysical thesis like idealism from considerations about our o– wn representations. A key step in this defense is to consider a special class of concepts – inescapable concepts – which we cannot rationally replace with different ones. All this leads to an approach for making progress in metaphysics – immanent metaphysics – which is broadly neo-Kantian in spirit. Besides a defense of conceptual idealism and of immanent metaphysics, this book also critically discusses several other versions of idealism that are good candidates for being live options in contemporary metaphysics

Epistemology · Idealism · Metaphysics · Physics · Realism · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Philosophy, Science, and History

Tools

Open DOILibgen