Spanish and Latin American
Metaphysics
Peter of Spain
Logic
• From the 13th to the 17th century in Europe,
logic, as one of seven liberal arts, formed part
of the core of university education
• The standard textbook taught in the
universities, which went through 166 editions,
was the Tractatus, also known as the
Summulae Logicales, of Peter of Spain
Scholasticism
• Peter of Spain became a leading
emblem of Scholasticism, the method of
dialectical reasoning that dominated
medieval universities
The Scholastic Method
• Examine a question or a work by a
significant author
• Survey various approaches to the issue
• Find points of disagreement among
these sources
• Use logic and the analysis of language
to resolve the dispute, ideally by
reconciling the views and revealing a
deeper agreement
Tractatus
• The Tractatus devotes five books to the
“old logic” of Aristotle:
– Parts of speech
– Propositions
– Syllogisms
– Topics of argumentation
– Aristotle’s categories
– Essential and accidental properties
New Logic
• The remaining seven books concern the
“new logic,” the logic of terms and the
theory of supposition that was a major
innovation of the 12th and 13th
centuries.
The Theory of Supposition
• To understand the structure of the world in its
broadest outlines, we need to understand the
structure of language
• To analyze the structure of language, we
must distinguish
– complex expressions, which have other
expressions as components, from
– simple expressions, which do not
• We break down complex expressions into
their simple components
Terms
• Some simple terms, such as not, if, of, such,
as, and the like, are syncategorematic: They
organize language but themselves refer to
nothing in the world
• Others, including proper names and common
nouns, are categorematic; they refer to
substances or things of other categories
Ontological Commitment
• We can understand what there must be
in the world by
– analyzing categorematic terms and
– seeing what their use commits us to
Semantics and Ontology
• Peter ‘s central idea is that metaphysics
rests on semantics, the theory of
meaning
• To find out what there is in the world,
– analyze language,
– understand what it means, and
– see what objects have to exist for what you
say about the world to be true
Peter’s Ontology
• Peter’s own metaphysical stance is fairly
neutral
• His theory of supposition holds that
– proper names stand for objects and that
– common nouns stand either for a kind of object or
for the individual objects falling under them
• He commits himself, in other words, to what
Aristotle would call primary and secondary
substances: individual objects and kinds
Universals
• The status of the other categories
formed the topic of one of medieval
philosophy’s central debates:
• Are universals (qualities, relations, etc.)
real?
• If so, are they mind-dependent or mindindependent?
• Peter himself offers no response
Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)
Ortega v. Idealism
• Ortega begins from the dispute between
realists and idealists
• Idealists contend that everything is
mind-dependent; the world is a mental
construction
• Ortega finds this view unsatisfying;
there are hard realities we confront that
are not of our own making
Ortega v. Realism
• But he finds realism unappealing as well
• Realists maintain that some things are
independent of mind
• This, Ortega believes, isolates mind
from world and makes it impossible to
understand how knowledge is possible
Mind and World
• Ortega insists that mind and world are
intertwined
• The world cannot be understood without
appeal to our own cognitive faculties
• But we cannot understand ourselves
without appeal to the world
• Contextualism: “I am myself and my
circumstance.”
Vital Reason
• I and my circumstances together constitute
life
• Reason can come to reliable conclusions only
when it focuses on life, taking both mind and
world, both subject and object, into account
• This is vital reason, which is historical, for we
cannot understand ourselves or our
circumstances without understanding how
they have come about
Bounded Freedom
• Ortega’s thought is contextualist,
historical, and dynamic
• We frequently encounter our own
limitations, imposed in part by aspects
of the world not of our own making
• We are free to choose who we are, but
that freedom is bounded
• Our lives are dramas in which our
freedom confronts those boundaries
Ortega’s Perspectivism
• Ortega’s perspectivist view of truth is not
Nietzsche’s, which, he says, threatens to
collapse into relativism
• Ortega thinks of describing a landscape—a
house, say, surrounded by trees
• No one perspective on the scene captures it
completely
• Yet no view is arbitrary or merely a mental
construction
Perspectives
Perspectives
• We might identify the truth about the
house and trees with the totality of all
possible perspectives on them
• But that totality is not itself a perspective
• There is no place to stand from which
one can see the house from all possible
points of view at once
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Tlön
• “Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not
admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest
conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to
the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet
are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of
their language- religion, letters, metaphysics- all presuppose
idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in
space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts.”
The Heresy of Materialism
• “On Tuesday, X crosses a deserted road and loses
nine copper coins. On Thursday, Y finds in the road
four coins, somewhat rusted by Wednesday's rain.
On Friday, Z discovers three coins on the road. On
Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor of
his house.”
The Heresy of Materialism
• “The heresiarch would deduce from this story the
reality— i.e., the continuity— of the nine coins which
were recovered. It is absurd (he affirmed) to imagine
that four of the coins have not existed between
Tuesday and Thursday, three between Tuesday and
Friday afternoon, two between Tuesday and Friday
morning. It is logical to think they have existed-- at
least in some secret way, hidden from the
comprehension of men-- at every moment of those
three periods.”
Missing Explanation Argument
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•
•
•
Realism explains our experiences
Maybe the idealist is right
Suppose everything were mind-dependent
Why are there regularities in my experiences? Why
does your experience align with mine?
• Realism explains this
• Idealism has no explanation
Missing Explanation Argument
• There are regularities in our experiences of the
world
• In similar circumstances you and I have similar
experiences
• The realist has a simple explanation: we see the
same thing
• The idealist has no such explanation
• Why do our experiences follow similar patterns?
Best Explanation Argument
• Realism is the simplest explanation of our
experiences
• Suppose the idealist is right
• Suppose things don’t exist, or obey natural laws
when we aren’t looking
• But it’s simpler to suppose they do
Idealism’s Triumph
• The story of Tlön gradually leaks out on earth,
and people become more and more
fascinated with the planet on which
everything is orderly, everything is mental,
and nothing has any independent existence
• Idealism slowly begins to dominate the
thinking of this world
• Fiction drives out reality