International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
One more general reflection, and we may pass to the consideration of the
relation of metaphysics to the various alreadyorganized branches of
human knowledge more in detail. The admission that there is, or may be,
such a study as we have described, seems of itself to involve the
recognition that definite knowledge about the character of what really
"is," is attainable, and thus to commit us to a position of sharp
opposition both to consistent and thorough-going agnosticism and also to
the latent agnosticism of Kantian and neo-Kantian "critical philosophy."
In recognizing ontology as a legitimate investigation, we revert in
principle to the "dogmatist" position common, _e. g._, to Plato, to
Spinoza and to Leibniz, that there is genuine truth which can be known,
and that this genuine truth is not confined to statements about the
process of knowing itself. In fact, the "critical" view that the only
certain truth is truth about the process of knowing seems to be
inherently self-contradictory. For the knowledge that such a proposition
as, _e. g._, "I know only the laws of my own apprehending activity," is
true, would itself be knowledge not about the process of knowing but
about the content known. Thus metaphysics, conceived as the science of
the general character which distinguishes truth from falsehood,
presupposes throughout all knowledge the presence of what we may call a
"transcendent object," that is, a content which is never identical with
the process by which it is apprehended, though it may no doubt be
maintained that the two, the process and its content, if distinct, are
yet not ultimately separable. That they are in point of fact not
ultimately separable would seem to be the doctrine which, under various
forms of statement, is common to and characteristic of all the
"idealistic" systems of metaphysics. So much then in defense of a
metaphysical point of view which seems to be closely akin to that of Mr.
Bradley and of Professor Royce, to mention only two names of
contemporary philosophers, and which might, I think, for the purpose of
putting it in sharp opposition to the "neo-Kantian" view, not unfairly
be called, if it is held to need a name, "neo-Leibnizian."
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