8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The real grounds the necessary, the supernatural grounds the possible, December 13, 2009
This review is from: Thought and World: The Hidden Necessities (Paperback)
James Ross is one of the most under-cited and yet most innovative and knowledgeable figures in what I'll call "scholastic analytic" thought. He is a rare thinker in that he is as equally conversant in ancient and scholastic thought as he is in modern analytic philosophical work. This book is a very tiny summa of his work and deserves more than one reading. It almost demands more than reading, in fact, since Ross's style is, somewhat notoriously, as dense as it is expressive. E.g., I can't find the citation in one of his essays [many of Ross's works are available at his U. Penn homepage] but I recall he illustrated how meaning as such can supervene and alter physical reality by saying an otherwise appealing chocolate cake can suddenly deform into something awful just by likening it to a turd, without of course anything changing in the cake's physical structure. You know an author is worth your time when he makes you laugh and wonder at the same time.
After laying out a borad forecast of his "structural realism" to follow in _Thought and World_, Ross (chapters 2 and 3) seeks to deflate the fashion of modalist, other-worlds metaphysics into de re necessities of actual existents. Contra modalist metaphysics, Ross argues, the real grounds the possible, not vice versa. The real for Ross is construed as God's ordinate power in 'this' creation. He points, obliquely and very briefly, to the basis of metaphysical possibility as lying in the transcendent sovereignty of God in a differently ordinated creation, not in some eternal Platonic realm of forms in all worlds.
(Having said that, don't think this is "a book about God." Ross has written extensively in the philosophy of religion [40+ years earlier having published his brief _Philosophy of Religion_ and more extensive _Philosophical Theology_], but only does so obliquely in _Thought and World_. Rather, you might say this is "a book about 'what God is about' in the world." A very up-to-date and analytically informed "natural philosophy" sensitive to what that practice meant centuries ago. I think Ross refers to God in modal affairs only because, one, he believes God's role in them is pertinent as such, and, two, possible-worlds ontologies are so far off the track vis-a-vis "real possibility" that they have ended up tramping into what are basically theological domains, unaware of their benign trespassing until, say, the divine provenance of possibility is explicitly pointed out. But I digress.)
Ross then discusses (chapter 4) how truth is an analogical concept, and as such how alethics can draw from correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, disquotational, etc. theories of truth, yet without leaning on any of them as 'the' theory of truth. There can be no single, absolute theory of truth according to Ross, since the "hidden necessities" in the real "overflow" what we can know and say about them. Real existents possess "transcendent determinateness" in a way that purely formal entities (like arithmetic sets, natural languages, logical symbolics, etc.) lack. Physically real existents possess truthmakers which surpass, probably for all time, our ability to state them. As such they are determinate in fact but transcendentally so with respect to reason. (This divergence between the physically real and the really formal plays a crucial role in Ross's later discussion of the irreducibly non-physical nature of intellection [chapter 6] and the imagination qua "master of falsity" [chapter 8].) Ross's emphasis on "de re overflow" gives a modestly realist, austerely scientific-empirical weight to Ross's metaphysics. Science has an essential role in metaphysics, Ross argues (chapter 7), more than mere analyticity and sentential finesse, since it belongs to science, and human-animal cognition generally, to engage the real in a piecewise exploration which depends on materialized dynamic intellligible structures (a la Aristotelian forms, or "software") everywhere in reality itself more than on the mere functions of our minds.
In chapter 5, Ross discusses the abstractive nature of animal cognition and, in turn (chapter 6), the irreducibly non-physical nature of human intellection. (This chapter is a modified version of his unjustly ignored 1992 "Immaterial Aspects of Thought".) Because our intellectual access to the physically real is transcendentally incommensurate with the parameters of the real itself, and because no physical state can wholly, determinately instantiate pure, incompossible functions in a single case (cf. grueness, quaddition, underdetermination, etc.), the intellectual and the physical are irreducibly distinct realities, and both are essential to human nature. Insofar as humans actually perform incompossible pure functions (like addition, modus ponens, definition, etc.), while wholly physical systems cannot, it follows that humans are not wholly physical systems.
My only complaint-- hence 4 out of 5 stars-- is that _Thought and World_ was too brief for my taste. (A reviewer in a Notre Dame philosophical review suggested Ross's brevity bordered on "stinginess" in some cases, since it leaves a lot of independent thought to the reader.) Even allowing for Ross's amicable, from-the-hip style of discourse, _Thought and World_ reads rather more like the working draft of the book-- like Ross's lecture notes, in fact-- than the final draft. Not that brevity and concision are bad things. But I would have liked to see more direct citations of Ross's sources. Then again, that's why he listed his sources: so noobs like myself can follow up! Obviously, Ross is a master in his field, so he is writing at a very advanced level (i.e., for those in the know at the professional level); as such, certainly my own ignorance is to blame for certain areas of obscurity in _Thought and World_. My mild criticisms aside, _Thought and World_ is essential as a sort of 'prognostication' of where analytic philosophy and classical metaphysics ought to head in order to reinforce each other.
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