A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

Guide to Matrices

Realism Matrix R1 Independence: “The world consists of some fixed totality of mindindependent objects” (Putnam 1981, 49). R2 Correspondence: “Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things” (Putnam 1981, 49). R3 Uniqueness: “There is exactly one true and complete description of ‘the way the world is’” (Putnam 1981, 49). R4 Bivalence: “The primary tenet of realism, as applied to some given class of statements, is that each statement in the class is determined as true or not true, independently of our knowledge, by some objective reality whose existence and constitution is, again, independent of our knowledge” (Dummett 1981, 434). R5 Passive Knower: “If, whenever I have to make a judgement, I restrain my will so that it extends to what the intellect clearly and distinctly reveals , and no further, then it is quite impossible for me to go wrong” (Descartes, PWD 2:43). R6 Realism of the Subject: “In order that as a science metaphysics may be entitled to claim, not mere fallacious plausibility, but insight and conviction , a critique of reason must itself exhibit the whole stock of a priori concepts, their division according to their various sources (sensibility, understanding, and reason), together with a complete table of them. . . . Metaphysics alone can . . . be brought to such completion and fixity as to require no further change or be capable of any augmentation by new discoveries” (Kant, PFM 105/365, 106/366). Anti-Realism Matrix A1 Mind-Dependence: “In pressing forward to its true existence, consciousness will arrive at a point at which it gets rid of its semblance of Guide to Matrices xix being burdened with something alien, with what is only for it, and with some sort of ‘other,’ at a point where appearance becomes identical with essence” (Hegel, PS 56–57, §89). A2 Rejection of Correspondence Truth: “The criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power” (Nietzsche, WTP 534). A3 Ontological Pluralism: “There are many kinds of eyes. . . . Consequently there are many kinds of ‘truths,’ and consequently there is no truth” (Nietzsche, WTP 540). A4 Rejection of Bivalence: “If the Object, the product of this transition, be brought into relation with the notion, which, so far as its special form is concerned, has vanished in it, we may give a correct expression to the result, by saying that notion (or, if it be preferred, subjectivity) and object are implicitly the same. But it is equally correct to say that they are different. In short, the two modes of expression are equally correct and incorrect. The true state of the case can be presented in no expressions of this kind” (Hegel, HL 257–58, §193, final italics added). A5 Active Knower: “The order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in appearances, had we not ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them there” (Kant, C1 A125). A6 Plural Subject: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary ; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? A kind of aristocracy of ‘cells’ in which dominion resides? . . . My hypotheses: The subject as multiplicity” (Nietzsche , WTP 490). Empirical Directive (ED): “This I or he or it (the thing) which thinks . . . is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever” (Kant, C1 A346/B404). The Heideggerian Paradigm Historical Phenomenological Ontology (HPO): “There is Being only in this or that particular historical character: physis, logos, en, idea, energeia, Substantiality, Objectivity, Subjectivity, the Will, the Will to Power, the Will to Will. . . . The manner in which it, Being, gives itself, is itself determined by the way in which it clears itself. This way, however, is a historic, always epochal character” (Heidegger, ID 66–67). xx G U I D E T O M A T R I C E S Mutual Interdependence (MI): “The fundamental idea of my thinking is exactly that Being, relative to the manifestation of Being, needs man and, conversely, man is only man in so far as he stands within the manifestation of Being. . . . One cannot pose a question about Being without posing a question about the essence of man” (Heidegger, MHC 40). Impersonal Conceptual Scheme (ICS): “The...