Does the World Exist? Plurisignificant Ciphering of Reality
"Does the World exist?" There would be no reason to resurrect this question of modernity from its historical oblivion were it not for the fact that recent evolution in science and technology, impregnating culture, makes us wonder about the nature of reali
- PDF / 140,123 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 430.854 x 632.109 pts Page_size
- 96 Downloads / 182 Views
A C L A S S I F I C AT I O N O F T H E A P P ROAC H E S TO T H E O N TO L O G Y O F P O S S I B L E WO R L D S
I N T RO D U C T I O N
Today there are two basic approaches to the existence of possible worlds.* According to the first approach possible worlds are real and our actual world is one of a whole series of possible worlds. David Lewis is one of the well–known philosophers of such an approach. Against this philosopher the second group claims that possible worlds are ideal, subjective or linguistical; Carnap, Kripke, and Rescher are some of the representatives of this group. For these philosophers, only this world of ours (the actual world) is real, and there cannot be other non-real possible worlds. Something’s missing, because although possible worlds for him are concepts, they are nevertheless real because they exist in the mind of God. In this sense, Leibniz’s philosophy is a conceptually realistic stand. What makes possible worlds individual and real is their place, namely in the mind of God. According to Leibniz, the universe – the actual world – is one of an infinite number of possible worlds existing in the mind of God. God created the universe by actualizing one of those possible worlds – the best one. Leibniz’s system is a philosophy which seeks to find answers to two basic questions: The first concerns the reasons for the existence of the present world and for its being what and how it is; the second concerns the things that are possible in the absolute sense. Although both are taken to be fundamental questions in the history of philosophy, I came across no article treating of the first question while reading the literature on possible worlds. In other words, the Leibnizian question concerning the reason for the way the actual world has turned out to be as it is is not taken into consideration in the current literature on possible worlds. Leibniz attempts to answer the first question by resorting to the “principle of sufficient reason.” According to this principle the reason a world actually exists is that it contains a maximal measure of being or realizes a maximal measure of good. In other words, only when their ingredients are so ordered do worlds become actual. This is what the principle of sufficient reason dictates, and is based on the belief that God will deign to create only absolute perfection. This approach, however, implies that any essential alteration will lead to the total change of the world in its entirety. 855 A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXXIX, 855–866. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
856
. SEM IHA AKINCI
One of the principal questions directed to Leibniz in correspondence with contemporary philosophers was whether God is capable of violating this restriction – capable, in other words, of creating less-than-perfect worlds. Leibniz gives equivocal answers to such questions, asserting that God is indeed capable of doing just as he likes, but willing to do anything short of the perfect would be incompatible with his own perfections. What follows from the above consid
Data Loading...
