The article deals with American Personalist Thomist, W. N. Clarke, and his theory of the foundation of metaphysics in interpersonal dialogue. Classical Thomist metaphysics is based on the philosophy of nature. Clarke does not reject this approach, but he prefers his theory as better and more useful. His theory has realist roots and tries to avoid the mistakes that are present, according to him, in Cartesian and Kantian approaches.
The article deals with cosmology and natural philosophy in the Middle Ages. The author focuses on cosmology of the late Middle Ages, and presents a structure of the cosmos, which was based on Aristotle's philosophy as seen from a Christian perspective. What is particularly important for the history of science, is the methodology of this vision of the world, a belief in the hierarchical order of the whole cosmos, and confidence in human cognitive capacity.
The meaning of the diagram presented in the first chapter of 'Interpretation of the 'Elementatio theologica' of Proclus' by Georgian philosopher Joane Petrizi (XI-XII centuries) is explained in the article (see the picture-diagram at the beginning of the article). The diagram serves there as an illustration for the laws of Aristotle's 'Organon'. It is identified with one of three diagrams (namely, with the diagram for the Figure I) that are presented in Ammonius Hermiae's (V-VI centuries) comment on Aristotle's 'Prior Analytics', and which are based on Aristotle's idea of a linear formulation of schemes of categorical syllogisms and their corresponding division into three figures.
The article shows the positions that philosophers held to the relationship between a priori judgments and those judgments which are valid necessarily. Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th and 19th century, who though often in different ways, opposed the concept of metaphysics and scholastic necessity (Hume, Kant, Mill, idealists), play the leading role. At the beginning of the 20th century analytic philosophy was born. Its first leaders inherited from their predecessors an antipathy to metaphysics, and so they had no desire to return again to the traditional concept of necessity (Wittgenstein, Carnap, Ayer). Their logic and the new characterization of the a priori paved the way for the linguistic turn. Some of their followers in the second half of the 20th century realized that the concept needed to be returned to its original meaning (Kripke). This is not a mere repetition of the Aristotelian-scholastic conception, but a new addition that rethinks the relationship between the notions of a priori and necessity.
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