Franz Knappik: Natural kinds, understanding and self-consciousness: ideas from Hegel
Høstens tredje instituttseminar er ved Franz Knappik, som er ansatt hos oss f.o.m. i høst.
Hovedinnhold
Sammendrag
"According to a view known as natural kind essentialism, there are natural kinds, and they have essences: there is, for each of those kinds, a defining property (or set of properties) such that, with metaphysical necessity, something is an instance of the kind iff it instantiates this property (set of properties). Natural kind essentialism has a long tradition in the history of philosophy and science, and since Putnam's and Kripke's seminal discussions, it has again found, in some version or another, many followers. But how can it exactly be argued for?
In my talk, I will first rehearse some problems for extant arguments in favour of natural kind essentialism, in particular, for Putnam/Kripke style semantic arguments, and for Brian Ellis’ more recent attempt to argue for natural kind essentialism on the basis of scientific practice. I will then explore an alternative way of arguing for natural kind essentialism that is inspired by Hegel. Hegel’s writings may seem an unlikely source of inspiration to draw upon in this context. But Hegel’s opus magnum, the “Science of Logic”, provides what is perhaps the most detailed and exhaustive discussion of the basic categories in the metaphysics of science of his time. The overarching aim of this discussion can be seen as developing and arguing for a version of natural kind essentialism. More precisely, it does so by motivating the assumption of natural kinds with essences as an account for the possibility of genuine explanations of observed phenomena. Central to Hegel’s argument, as I will reconstruct it, are the following ideas: (a) what the metaphysical preconditions of explanation are depends on what explanations are, and this depends on what it means to /understand/ something; (b) an account of what it means to understand something has to draw on an account of the fundamental structure of ourselves as thinking subjects; (c) central to such an account is an account of self-consciousness."
