Davide Andrea Zappulli

This paper aims to discern the latent positive metaphysics of divinity in Brook Ziporyn’s concept of mystical atheism. Ziporyn provides a taxonomy of four ways of characterizing the relationship between divinity, the ultimate character of existence, and human experience: Emulative Theism, Compensatory Theism, Compensatory Atheism, and Emulative Atheism. Ziporyn favors Emulative Atheism. He then adds a further subcategorization to the view: Emulative Intersubsumptive Atheism. This is the view Ziporyn finds most clearly in Tiantai Buddhism, though he hints that Classical Daoism, Confucianism, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille may also count as cases. This paper claims that there is a latent positive metaphysics of divinity to Emulative Intersubsumptive Atheism. It does so by showing that Ziporyn’s modal notion of the divine as ‘raw infinity’ resembles logical pantheism, the view that God is the greatest conceivable being insofar as it is the totality of all possible and impossible worlds, logical space itself. However, Ziporyn modifies logical pantheism to involve a novel global metaphysical view, one-all monism. In other words, this paper claims that Emulative Intersubsumptive Atheism entails a one-all monist version of logical pantheism. Ziporyn’s positive view of divinity involves a kind of pantheism wherein a fully symmetrical and reflexive identity is found between the one perfect divine being and each and every possible and impossible world.

The concept of the interdependence of all things appears across Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. Jizang (549−623 CE), a prominent Chinese Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, contends that all objects are established by virtue of their mutual dependence. He endorses what can be termed “the interdependence thesis”—the view that the referents of complementary concepts or words are interdependent. In this paper, I clarify this thesis and characterize Jizang’s ontology as a form of metaphysical nonrealism. Drawing on this ontology, I construct an argument for the plausibility of the interdependence thesis. I also respond to several objections to the argument.