Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality

Do human beings have a special and distinguished place in reality? In Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality Thomas Hofweber contends that they do. We are special since there is an intimate connection between our human minds and reality itself. This book defends a form of idealism which holds that our human minds constrain, but do not construct, reality as the totality of facts. Reality as the totality of facts is thus not independent of our minds, and our minds play a metaphysically special role in all of reality. But reality as the totality of things is taken to be completely independent of us. Hofweber’s proposed form of conceptual idealism is formulated via the notion of a harmony between our minds and reality. A key step in the book’s argument is to consider a special class of concepts--inescapable concepts--which we cannot rationally replace with different ones. This leads to a new approach for making progress in metaphysics--immanent metaphysics--which is broadly neo-Kantian in spirit.

Thomas Hofweber, William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thomas Hofweber is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He specializes in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mathematics. He is the author of Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2016) besides numerous articles.