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Philosophy as Total Axiomatics: Serious Metaphysics, Scrutability Bases, and Aesthetic Evaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2016

URIAH KRIEGEL
URIAH KRIEGEL*
Affiliation:
JEAN NICOD INSTITUTE, PARIS, FRANCEtheuriah@gmail.com
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Abstract:

What is the aim of philosophy? There may be too many philosophical branches, traditions, practices, and programs to admit of a single overarching aim. Here, I focus on a fairly traditional philosophical project that has recently received increasingly sophisticated articulation, especially by Frank Jackson (1998) and David Chalmers (2012). In Section 1, I present the project and suggest that it is usefully thought of as ‘total axiomatics’: the project of attempting to axiomatize the total theory of the world. In Section 2, I raise a problem for the project that I call the ‘problem of multiple axiomatizations’. I consider some initially alluring but ultimately unpromising approaches to this problem in Section 3. In Section 4, I defend a surprising approach to the problem, according to which competing axiomatizations of the total theory of the world are effectively evaluated for their aesthetic virtues.

Keywords

serious metaphysicsscrutabilitymetaphilosophythe aim of philosophytotal axiomatics

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Type
Articles
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Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , Summer 2016 , pp. 272 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2016 

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