Among the starkest contrasts brought into view in the wake of 2020 (as it has unfolded thus far) can be seen in the struggle to communicate on a meaningful level. The United States in particular has witnessed an increasingly shrill level of debate over the unfolding and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic repercussions arising therefrom, and the widespread protesting in response to various forms of systemic racism. What is most alarming to me about the many related debates and discussions, which I have witnessed both privately and publicly, is the extent to which they appear interminable and incommensurable.1 It is not merely that people disagree, it is that they appear unable to actually communicate meaningfully. Here I wish to explore, in (regrettably) inchoate form, one possible reason for this.2
Continue reading “Theoretical Frameworks and the Limits of Communication”Category: Michael Wiitala
An Introduction to Being and Existence in Modern and Pre-Modern Philosophy
One of the central questions of modern and contemporary philosophy is “What exists?” Do I exist? Does the material world exist? Does the soul exist? Do universals exist? Do numbers exist? Does God exist? Ancient and medieval philosophy, however, was not very concerned with these sorts of questions. Although these sorts of questions were raised and discussed on occasion, the Platonic and Aristotelian outlooks that dominated ancient and medieval philosophy in the West generally granted existence (or more precisely, being) to anything about which true and false statements could be made. The questions with which ancient and medieval philosophy were most concerned were not questions of existence, but rather questions of grounding, of which beings were more fundamental, and on what it means to be a being.1 In this essay, I want to reflect on one facet of this basic difference in orientation between modern and pre-modern notions of reality. I want to focus on the difference in the way that the ancients and medievals, on the one hand, and us moderns, on the other, tend to think about what it means for something “to exist” or “to be.” While I will mainly talk about how “existence” or “being” is employed in the philosophical thinking typical of the pre-modern and modern West, I think reflecting on these issues will help us better understand key differences between pre-modern and modern worldviews in general.