Michaël Bauwens

This paper explores the prospects of an interpersonal metaphysics of persons, powers and contingency for conceiving of the real presence. A generic sketch of such a metaphysical framework is presented whereby persons and their decisions are the irreducible source of contingency in reality, akin to divine creative freedom. An infinity mirror whereby two persons reciprocally and totally value each other opens up the possibility of new or extended life. This model is then used to make a metaphysical sketch of the Incarnation, and based upon that, the last supper and Calvary.

September 14, 2023, marks the quarter centennial of the encyclical Fides et ratio. Devoted to the relationship between faith and reason and written by a philosopher-pope, it immediately brings to mind—and makes explicit reference to—the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris by Leo XIII. Both encyclicals are concerned with the relationship between faith and reason in the modern era and stress the important and indispensable role of philosophy for the Church. The nineteenth-century encyclical was crisp, concise, and programmatic in spirit, proposing a very specific approach and project—and inspiring a worldwide academic movement to study the philosophy and theology of the scholastics, especially that of Thomas Aquinas. The twentieth-century encyclical was much less a programmatic clarion call and more a broad and earnest call to openness, awareness, and mutual rapprochement—and it has not really ushered in a new chapter in the intellectual life of the Church.

This paper charitably develops a possible metaphysical argument against usury, as a common ground on which theology and economics can consider the issue. The metaphysical framework is derived from Anselm’s Augustinian-Platonist metaphysics of participation whereby all goods are good through the one supreme good which alone is good through itself. Two arguments for the charging of interest are considered, namely the argument from time preference and the argument from opportunity costs. In both cases, these arguments show a problematic tension in light of the full presence, in the present, of the highest good through which any good or action is at all good, thereby indicating a possible metaphysical ground for the moral intuition against usury. It is most closely related to the historical argument against usury as a “theft of time.”

One of the emerging fields within analytic metaphysics is social ontology. This paper argues for a distinction between social metaphysics and social ontology in order to clear up some of the confusion that is plaguing the field. That terminological distinction has deep historical and philosophical roots which are relevant for the specific case of social reality. According to the proposed distinction, social metaphysics takes up the most fundamental questions pertaining to the very nature and being of social reality, whereas social ontology has the more specific task of drawing an inventory of social reality as it exists and elucidating the properties of its items and categories. The distinction itself is further specified as involving both abstraction and asymmetry. One can abstract from one domain while focusing upon the other, which is different from separating or isolating one domain from the other. There is an asymmetry between the two domains whereby social metaphysics enables and conditions social ontology, but not vice versa.

This paper explores and defends an institutional metaphysics for the Trinity as providing us with an inherently interpersonal reality, and provides general and specific methodological arguments in that direction in the first section. The actual argumentation is then first of all directed against Augustine’s rejection of the family as a suitable analogy for the Trinity. It is instead argued that the family does in fact offer an interesting and suitable analogy. Next, several more general and historic precursors to such an institutional analogy are explored and fleshed out, relying on the legal and economic meaning of the term ‘substance’ as an estate, such as the shared inheritance between a father and a son. The main section further develops the outlines and main features of such an institutional metaphysics, relying on both analogies to result in three persons in one numerically identical substance. The final section returns to the methodological issue but now in an explicitly Marian key, culminating in the Holy Family as a key exemplar for the family analogy.

This paper takes Anscombe, Mumford and Anjum as key interlocutors for an exploration of the causality involved in our understanding of free will. Anscombe tried to disentangle causality from necessary determination in order to make room for free will, and a first section points to the historical and theological background of this entanglement. However, what is also crucially at stake is the relation between time and causality whereby this paper advocates a shift from a diachronic to a synchronic conception. This synchronic conception of the contingency of free will is then argued to be superior to Mumford and Anjum’s dispositional modality in providing the libertarian desiderata of alternative possibilities and ultimate authorship, and gives us a picture of a permanent causal tug-of-war in the present. The final section then points out that this puts persons and their contingent decisions partly in the role of being an explanans for, rather than an explanandum of, any current contingent state of affairs.

The aim of this research project is to shed light on the fundamental nature and mode of being of institutions. Starting from the work of John Searle, the goal is to develop an ontology of institutions that is both better metaphysically grounded than Searle's, and more developed towards applications in the social sciences and social and political philosophy. It relies on a metaphysics of powers and dispositions, as developed in the recent literature in analytic metaphysics, in order to offer an account of institutions as dispositional structures that are ontologically dependent on specific human powers. Specific applications in the social sciences and political philosophy include the ontology of money, banking, marriage, property and the state.

In his stimulating contribution, Corrado Roversi uses speech act theory to propose a more nuanced and shaded account of how agents can relate themselves to institutions than H. Hart’s binary distinction between the internal and external point of view. Although we agree on the central importance of Hart in charting recent work in social ontology, we propose to recast Roversi’s contribution in terms of the various ways in which an agent’s commitment to an institution can corrode or strengthen an institution. In the first part we highlight several features of the internal/external distinction as developed by Hart and others. Whereas the internal point of view is manifested by following the rules and criticizing others for failing to do so, the external point of view can be characterized by, amongst others, a rejection of the rules or a theoretical understanding from the outside. The second part critically examines Roversi’s proposal as exemplified with the different kinds of chess players. Instead, several points at which a player might fail to commit himself to the institution of chess are identified, arguing that this provides a better taxonomy than the one proposed by Roversi. The last section deals with the ‘perlocutionary’ goal of institutions, stressing that all institutions attempt to solve pre-institutional coordination problems.

Since heaven is the most perfect state or position possible – namely of loving God perfectly – and sinning is failing to love God, it will not be possible to sin in heaven. However, if freedom is a mark of perfection, and loving God is only possible when one freely loves God, will we be loving God at all if we are not free not to love him? Three cumulative arguments for an affirmative answer are developed. The first is to distinguish the ability to love or sin from the opportunity to do so. In heaven we are loving God in an infinite variety of ways, so we are freely exercising our ability to love, even when God has taken away any opportunities for sinning. However, one might reply that our freedom will only be the freedom to love God in various ways, not the freedom to love God or not. Hence the second argument is that in heaven are only people who have freely chosen to love God while on earth, where there was a real opportunity not to love God. Since the free choice to love God was made before entering heaven, loving God in heaven remains a free choice. Moreover, since in heaven God takes away the opportunity to sin, and stopping to love God would be a sin, you will remain steadfast in that free choice. However, one might reply that also having the opportunity to sin would add an extra possibility for willing something, so one would be 'more free' in heaven, and heaven would be more perfect, if one would also have the opportunity to sin. Hence the third argument is that freedom is a perfection shared by both God and humans, and the freedom of God is in an important respect a freedom to create. Hence, our human freedom is also greater if our creative power is greater. We have no creative power but by participating in God’s creative power, which is necessarily directed towards the good. So by willing what is good we extend and perfect creation and thereby extend and perfect our possibilities for willing, hence we become more free. On the contrary, by sinning we destroy creation and possibilities for willing and we become less free, so an opportunity to sin is not a possibility that increases our freedom.

The recent economic crisis has re-ignited the debate over the institution of fractional reserve banking (FRB) and its possible adverse economic effects. This paper brings a so far neglected aspect of the problem to the table, namely social ontology. After addressing the scope of social ontology in relation to social metaphysics, social science and FRB, a general ontological framework for money and banking is sketched and applied to the debate between Austrian opponents and proponents of FRB. It shows that the oppositions reflect metaphysical and ontological positions on the reality of powers and dispositions, namely that a realist position in the metaphysics of powers and dispositions tends to a critical position toward FRB, whereas a sceptical position on powers and dispositions leads to a favorable position toward FRB. A final section gives further examples of how these ontological presuppositions shape other arguments in the debate.

In a series of articles written around the turn of the century, Guido Hülsmann has tried to answer one simple question: “How can we reconcile the idea that there are laws of human action, that manifest themselves in market prices and the structure of production, with the idea that there is also freedom of choice?” (Hülsmann, 2000, p. 48) He has addressed the question most extensively in his “Facts and Counterfactuals in Economic Law” (Hülsmann, 2003), but his distinctive approach is present in several other articles as well (Hülsmann, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004). Moreover, the first explicit development of this insight is in Hülsmann (1999), in response to Caplan’s elaborate critique of the Austrian methodology, thereby indicating how crucial the issue is to praxeology as an intellectual enterprise, and to that extent to Austrian economics. Mateusz Machaj has commented on the very core of Hülsmann’s proposal (Machaj, 2012). As an epigraph, he chose a quote from Morpheus in The Matrix: “What happened, happened, and couldn’t have happened any other way”—pun intended or not against Hülsmann’s (metaphysical) libertarianism. This paper will briefly present Hülsmann’s main claim, Machaj’s comments, and offer a reply to those comments, further clarifying Hülsmann’s point.

This paper addresses the question what the fundamental nature and mode of being of institutional reality is. Besides the recent debate with Tony Lawson, Barry Smith is also one of the relatively few authors to have explicitly challenged John Searle's social ontology on this metaphysical question, with Smith's realism requirement for institutions conflicting with Searle's requirement of a one-world naturalism. This paper proposes that an account of institutions as powers or dispositions is not only congenial to Searle's general account, but can also satisfy both the realism and the one world requirements. Searle's worry that such a dispositional account is unable to account for the deontic nature of institutions is countered by an appeal to higher-order powers as well as Searle's notion of the gap and desire-independent reasons for action.

This paper proposes a theological grounding for the possibility of metaphysics. After a brief critique of the seeming contemporary revival of analytic philosophy as characterized by linguisticism, the two main sections give a Christological and ultimately Mariological foundation for the possibility of metaphysics. The Christological section starts with the role of the second person of the Trinity in creation, and subsequently points to the hypostatic union as ensuring that creation is therefore accessible to the human mind. It also implies that reality is fundamentally of a personal nature, and that personal knowledge can be relatively unproblematically acquired by other persons. The Mariological section starts from Plato’s Diotima as a prefigurement of Mary, and subsequently portrays Mary as the perfect metaphysician, guaranteeing the possibility of metaphysics as an enterprise of natural reason. Doing justice to the critique of an at times overly naive pre-modern metaphysics can then be done by advocating a Christological and Mariological turn for the Copernican revolution, e.g. fully taking into account the historicity of being and thinking. In conclusion, Mary as the handmaid of the Lord is analogous to metaphysics as the handmaid of theology, in a relationship of a loving daughter, mother and bride.

This paper provides a metaphysical framework which enables the possibility of the hypostatic union. More specifically, social ontology will be used to philosophically ground the distinction between nature or substance on the one hand, and person on the other hand, which is crucial to that debate. There are some historical precedents for a juridical approach in christological debates, but the main sections develop a systematic metaphysical account. Relying on a generic version of dispositional realism, and the distinction between the ability space and the liberty space of a person, a person is the locus or nexus of contingent activations of alternative possibilities. This is distinct from the set or range of alternative possibilities open to a person. Persons can therefore function as artificial persons, paradigmatically exemplified in sovereign states. Extending that framework to the supernatural level enables the possibility of a divine person uniting a divine and a human nature.