conceptual

  I. Introduction Before he reached his mature metaphysical view of being as gradual in the  Republic   (Allen 1961) , Plato claims that neither can negative facts explain positive facts, nor vice versa  ( Phaedo  103b) (this is very likely a corollary of  his principle of opposites  according to which if  A  and  B  are of opposite ontological categories,  A  cannot explain  B  ( González-Varela and Barceló  2 023 ). After Plato, this principle pops up once and again through the history of Western Philosophy.  Paulo Sergio Méndoza just informed me (on January 2024) that Kant held a similar ontological principle in his A  New  Explanation  of the  First  Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge   (September 27, 1755).  In pages that seem to have come out directly off Plato, Schelling appeals a version of this principle on its rejection of Spinoza's teology. For Schelling, ...