Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

or spirit, but it was not really meant that way by the Stoics.) This ordering principle is what grounds reality — it gives essence to substance as well as to us — it rescues us from idealism. A simple way to think about panpsychism, for instance, is just that consciousness is the substrate that makes sense of — that grounds — the relations explored by science. (We’ll get to panpsychism in a future chapter.)

Thus, we have looked at some as yet undiscovered type of matter as the ground, mathematics and natural laws as the ground and consciousness as the ground. The foregoing paragraphs suggest there may be some essence or quintessence that grounds things. This might be a supernatural quality, but it might equally just be a deeper understanding of the meaning of relation.

So much for the four options for truth with which we began this chapter. All other basic ideas might be grouped into a few further categories. There is ‘coherentism’ — where there is no ultimate basis for knowledge, but there is a system of thoughts that hang together (thus, ‘cohere’) as a sensible story.

There is phenomenology — the idea that all that’s known of the world is through our direct experience of it — and taking ‘direct experience’ to mean something different from merely the gathering of empirical knowledge. It could be said that phenomenology is the only one of our truth-seeking categories that deals directly with conscious experience. But this might be a contested point, if, for instance, consciousness were included in the understanding of

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