ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a number of metaphysical theories, and aims to distinguish among them two main types, which can most conveniently be called by the old-fashioned terms ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’. In systems such as Platonism the promise is held out that human reason, when properly put to work, can move beyond the confused and confusing world of sense to the unchanging realities which underlie it; this is at once a process of enlightenment and of liberation. Aristotle glanced at this question in speaking of God, who was just such a pure intellect according to the argument of Book A of the Metaphysics; he said enigmatically that God’s activity would consist in a (or the) ‘knowing of knowing’. A possible answer would be deductive reasoning of the mathematical kind; ‘knowing of knowing’ would then consist in second-order scrutiny of processes of demonstrative inference, and God would be condemned on this account to an eternity of formal logic.
