Metaphysics
摘要
In this chapter, I address the question of Lipps’s metaphysics, another aspect of his oeuvre that has been undeservedly neglected by the scholarship. I propose a systematic reappraisal of his metaphysical ideas and how they resonate in the philosophical context of the time. The present chapter is divided into two sections, each of which deals with a well-identified evolutionary stage of Lipps’s metaphysical thought. In the first section, I discuss his early investigations on metaphysics (c. 1877–1893). I show that, although he discussed metaphysical concerns during that period, Lipps did not identify metaphysics as an autonomous domain within his theoretical philosophy. Here his reflections on the nature of objective reality and the existence of the world make him appear as an ideal-realistic rather than a genuine idealistic metaphysician. The chapter’s second section is devoted to the period 1903–1913, during which Lipps strove to lay the foundations of an authentic metaphysical system, which he conceived as “an absolute (objective) idealism” and “a monism of consciousness.” I offer an in-depth discussion of the four texts in which he expounds the basic tenets of his mature metaphysics, whose core idea is the panpsychic view that world consciousness is the ultimate foundation of reality.