Ontology of The Possible: on the Structure of the Object
Giuseppe Armogida
Open Philosophy October 1, 2018 DOI: 10.1515/opphil-2018-0022 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that consciousness accesses reality through a realist reading of Husserlian phenomenology, in which each object stands in tension between its essence and its concrete manifestations. Proposes that language can express a thing's evidence only 'for conjectures,' and that analogy, operating through a logic of contradiction, is the only device that captures the object as a 'unity-without-a-mixture' of distinct forms. |
Abstract
Abstract This paper, through a realist reading of Husserlian phenomenology, aims to explain how the consciousness-sense has access to reality and, in general, to objectivity. There is a ‘strife’ between the essence of a thing and the specific concreteness in which it always becomes manifest, such that the identical object is indicated by changeable predicates, but at the same time always distinguishes itself from them. Language can express the evidence of the thing - which makes the determinable aspects of the thing exist and which is inexpressible through definitions - only “for conjectures”, showing the difference between its own expression and the thing. And it can do this by analogy, the only device that exhibits the antinomic relationship between the object and its determinations, and, in the meantime, makes possible not so much their composition, but rather their transformation. Analogy, in fact, operating through a logic of contradiction, grasps, within each object, the tension between the element of permanence and the element of emergency; shows how the object is a unity-without-a-mixture of absolutely distinct forms; and so it comes to think about the relationship between the in-definable forms of the possible representations of the thing and the impossible expression of its singularity.