ABSTRACT
The point of wit is often to render a disturbing truth harmless, and it may be that the witticism that the philosopher's hell is Paradox Lost and his heaven Paradox Regained springs from a glimpse into the subterranean workings of philosophy. For if we look closely at metaphysical theories we find a surprisingly large number of paradoxes in unexpected places, quite apart from the explicitly formulated paradoxes such as those of Zeno and Kant. The idea which suggests itself is that a paradox or a contradiction lies hidden in every metaphysical theory, that it is in the very stuff from which metaphysical theories are woven. In our childhood we took pleasure in discovering faces and animals cleverly concealed in drawings of landscapes and the like, and it would not be surprising to learn that we take like pleasure in the contemplation of statements which contain hidden paradoxes. As will be seen in the course of this study there is reason to think that the visible theories and arguments of metaphysics teem with invisible paradoxes, contradictions, and antinomies, and that in metaphysics we are everywhere surrounded by paradox. Ancient Greek philosophers arrived at the proposition that nature works by unseen bodies. It would appear that a like proposition holds for metaphysics: metaphysics works by unseen paradoxes.
