In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

193 Chapter Ten The Metaphysics of Cosmological Ultimacy I. Determinateness as Harmony: Essential and Conditional Components Before we can be more exact about what might constitute the ontological context of the mutual relevance of determinate things, it is important to develop a formal theory of determinateness. In several of the previous chapters it was asserted that to be determinate is to be a harmony of essential and conditional components. Now this needs to be explicated as a proper metaphysical hypothesis. To be a thing is to be determinate, to be something rather than something else or nothing.The hypothesis to be advanced is that to be determinate is to be a harmony of at least two kinds of components. The conditional components of a thing are those by virtue of which it is related to other things, conditioned by them or conditioning them.The essential components are those by virtue of which the harmony integrates the conditional components so as to have its own-being. Note at the outset how abstract this point is. Many kinds of things exist, stable things and changes, ideas and physical objects, past, present, and future things, contradictions and counterfactuals, totally determinate things and infinitesimally determinate things. The analysis of determinateness must be abstract enough to apply to anything. Furthermore, the analysis of determinateness must be abstract enough to apply to any and all philosophical theories about what it is to be a thing, to Aristotelian substance theories, Platonic theories of the ideal, Neo-Platonic theories of emanating things, Cartesian , Leibnizean, Spinozistic, Hobbesian, Lockean, Humean, Kantian, Hegelian ,Whiteheadian, and all other Western philosophical theories. Of course, to be properly abstract, the analysis of determinateness should apply to Chinese conceptions of yin-yang changes, South Asian theories of nondual things, and 194 v Ultimates Buddhist theories of empty dharmas rushing pall mall in pratitya samutpada. The level of abstraction involved in analyzing determinateness needs to allow that any and all of these more specific theories might be true.These theories are not compatible with each other, but we do not have to sort or evaluate them to see well enough that they ascribe determinateness to things that fall under their analysis. The abstractness of the hypothesis about harmonies of conditional and essential components is so great that it is almost impossible to explicate without calling to mind specific examples of conditional and essential components . Those examples would already be couched in some more specific languages, such as those mentioned in the previous paragraph. As indicated in Chapter 9, Section I, we can distinguish the strictly metaphysical theory of determinateness as harmonies of essential and conditional components from philosophical cosmologies of various sorts that illustrate it. Even when they contradict one another or are in such different languages as not immediately to be comparable, all the philosophical cosmologies must illustrate it if the metaphysical hypothesis about determinateness is properly abstract. Charles Peirce would say that the kind of abstraction involved that contains contradictories within it is “vagueness.” Although it might seem a disadvantage for the theory of determinateness to be so abstract as to apply to all possible kinds of determinations, a compensating advantage also holds. The abstract metaphysical hypothesis has the power to ask questions and reveal limitations of the more specific philosophical cosmologies that illustrate it. In the consideration of those cosmologies, we can ask how they deal with the question of determinateness, and judge whether their account is sufficiently full, consistent, coherent, adequate, and applicable to all possible determinate things. Consider the following.Without conditional components, things would be such atoms as to have no relations whatsoever. Strict philosophical atomisms have always been a difficulty, because most such theories say that there is a space–time receptacle with intrinsic properties of motion that impose external relations on the atoms. That receptacle is determinate, but is not another atom; and therefore determinateness as such cannot be defined atomistically. Moreover, although the receptacle might impose only external relations on the atoms with reference to one another, it must itself be internally related to the atoms in order to contain them and move them about. For atoms to be in space–time, they must have some internal space–time dimension of their own, and hence have characteristics of the receptacle internal to their natures as atoms. Leibniz’ theory of monads, in his Monadology, was perhaps the most ingenious Western attempt to hold to a philosophical atomism. He argued that, internally, the monads have no space–time dimensionality...

Share