ABSTRACT
Is it possible to provide any stricter, more formal kind of unity than the convergence that results from discussing a single world and a single range of experience? The great rationalist thinkers of the seventeenth century were obsessed by the ambition to drill all thought into a single formal system. Descartes himself, as well as Spinoza and Leibniz, tried inexhaustibly to mend the mind/body gap by building abstract metaphysical systems powered by arguments akin to their favoured models of thought, logic and mathematics. They were answered, however, by empiricists such as Locke and Hume who pointed out how disastrously this project ignores the huge element of contingency that pervades all experience. We are not terms in an abstract calculation but real concrete beings. We do not live in a pure world of necessary connections but in one shaped, over countless ages, by countless events of which we know very little. We deal with this pervasive contingency by ways of thinking – such as historical methods – which provide crucial forms for our understanding of this strange world, but which cannot be reduced to a single form.
