Jean Wahl's classic history, Pluralist Philosophies of England and America (..) modern philosophical pluralism begins with the rejection of substance metaphysics and the embracing of temporality and relation as its basic postulates. (..) there are no "things" at all, in any final sense, but constellations of relations taken as things, on the basis of values presupposed in the act of thinking them as things. (..) "things" are ways of construing relations, and relations are irreducibly plural. (..) philosophical pluralism is, among other things, an attempt to explain not just a culture, but the very possibility and existence of cultures. (..) what global pluralism means in the first instance is that human beings make for themselves the worlds they inhabit so that those worlds will then fashion the kind of human being that shall inhabit them. (..) pluralism calls for more rigor in grasping what we know, how we know it, what values we presuppose, what values we advance, and what philosophical, artistic, scientific, political and religious descriptions we recognize and take into account. (..) in the philosophy of biology, Sandra D. Mitchell says that (..) One feature of this corresponding complexity of representations is pluralism, in contrast to the unity of scientific constructions" (..) "Pluralism in this domain is not an embarrassment of an immature science, but the mark of a science of complexity" (..) mature philosophical pluralism in no way implies that there is no ultimate unity of truth; rather, it recognizes that if such a thing exists, humanity is far from finding it. (..) No pluralist would ever be in a position to rule out the ultimate unity of being, but whether the expression of such a unity would be recognizable as a philosophy to us is something we can afford to doubt. (..) The many are appearance, the real is One. The task is how to know the One, whether it be construed as the Good, the Beautiful, or, as it has been since the Enlightenment, the True. (..) necessity was regarded as the most basic modal idea, and it was used to stitch together being, knowing, and reasoning or logic. (..) The judgment of history favored necessity, and an unholy trinity of Being, Know ing, and Logic (or Reason, in the narrowest sense) was given the scepter. (..) Kant: Being, as such, is beyond the reach of all legitimate judgments, the unity of truth is the contribution of a transcendental self of which we have no direct knowledge, and necessity is simply the mark of how we have to think in order to know anything, not a mark of how things are. (..) Reason has its domain, but that domain does not prescribe to Being how it must be, only to knowing the conditions under which it can know. (..) Time is the possibility of relation. This, I think, is the key to the method of possibility, and the very beating heart of pluralistic thinking |