Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality

Description

Do human beings have a special and distinguished place in reality? In Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality Thomas Hofweber contends that they do. We are special since there is an intimate connection between our human minds and reality itself. This book defends a form of idealism 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. Hofweber's proposed form of conceptual idealism is formulated via the notion of a harmony between our minds and reality. This harmony is defended through considerations in the philosophy of language. How can one possibly defend a metaphysical thesis like idealism from considerations about our own representation? A key step in the book's argument is to consider a special class of concepts--inescapable concepts--which we cannot rationally replace with different ones. This leads to a new approach for making progress in metaphysics--immanent metaphysics--which is broadly neo-Kantian in spirit. Cover Title Page Contents Preface 1. Idealism and our place in the world 1.1 The Big Question 1.2 Idealism: the main idea 1.3 Idealism: some constraints 1.4 Idealism: the main options 2. Forms of idealism we should reject 2.1 Phenomenalism 2.2 Conventionalism 2.3 The subjectivity thesis 2.4 Fragmentalism 2.5 Idealist theories of properties and truth 3. Conceptual idealism: the basic idea 3.1 Idealism via harmony 3.2 Harmony via internalism 3.3 How the argument is possible 3.4 But is it really idealism? 3.5 Filling in the picture 4. The internalist conception of facts 4.1 Fact-terms 4.2 Quantification 4.3 Context-sensitive quantifier inferences 4.4 Quantification and modality 4.5 The internalist position 5. Harmony and ineffability 5.1 From structural harmony to complete harmony? 5.2 The concept of the ineffable 5.3 Objects as a source of ineffability 5.4 The argument for complete harmony 5.5 The consequences of complete harmony 5.6 Constraining logical space 6. Inescapable concepts 6.1 The language-metaphysics gap 6.2 The idea of inescapable concepts 6.3 The significance of inescapable concepts 6.4 The inescapability of the propositional 6.5 Conceptual idealism as a deep result 7. The immanent stance 7.1 Rational traps 7.2 Immanent rationality and the asymmetry thesis 7.3 The immanent and the transcendent stance 7.4 Eklund on ought 7.5 Immanent metaphysics 8. Conceptual idealism: the overall picture 8.1 The Big Question revisited 8.2 How the constraints are met 8.3 The metaphysics of conceptual idealism 8.4 The meta-metaphysics of conceptual idealism 8.5 Onward Bibliography Index