Daniel Peres Santos

This work proposes to answer one main question: What does it mean to say, “everything is alive”? Inquiring about the question leads us to clarify a distinction between everything as a whole and everything as in each part. Additionally, the concept of “alive” must also be defined. In the first part I explore the metaphysical system of Margareth Cavendish, focusing on her account of an infinitely divided nature and the commixture of matter. In the second part, the metaphysical system of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is presented, with a specific aim of understanding the constitution, kinds, and creation of monads. Both accounts provide answers to the main question. Nonetheless, some differences in what nature is, leads to peculiar results. Either way, as I will try to show, they both agree that everything is alive.

One of the constants in Noam Chomsky’s philosophical, linguistic and ethical positions is the existence of what he calls “human nature”. Following Marx, Darwin and last century’s revolutions in the social sciences, human nature has been one of the most contested conceptual holdovers from modern European philosophy. Chomsky’s discoveries and models on syntax and language make up one of the frameworks to most critically offset the traditional moral dimension of human nature. Contrary to most traditions prior to his work, language can no longer be restricted to either mind, soul or spirit. Language, as Chomsky has continually upheld and sharply refined, is a physical and biological process. But how his notion of human nature derives from this process is complex, as he seems to disregard philosophy’s classic analytic delineation between the descriptive causal realm of human nature and the normative axiological extensions of the same concept. In this paper, we seek to examine the philosophical and ontological implications of Chomsky’s claim that human nature derives from the innate dimension of the language faculty. Not only does Chomsky maintain the category of human nature, he also indexes it to the question of freedom. We thereby argue for the coherence of his proposal and show how it operates to weld the perspective of a modal theory of biologically-rooted creativity to innate conditions specific to his theory of language generation. However, we question whether its restriction to humans alone is sustainable from a scientific perspective by putting forth the claim that Chomsky’s science is in fact a radical ontology of social subjectivation.