Abstract

It has been charged that Modes of Being is a metaphysics which still needs an epistemology to underpin its speculative claims or a "phenomenology" to connect the abstract system with ordinary experience. Among the discussions in this fascicle are several suggestive attempts to fill such gaps. Weiss poses the basic problem in a fairly ontological way, asking the general question of the relation of theoretical entities and entities of ordinary experience. He admits that Modes of Being was biased toward Actuality as that mode appropriate to the human knower, and suggests that there is a kind of Experience of the modes which is neutral and interlocking. But this is to raise the epistemological counterpart of the problem of hypostatizing the "togetherness" of the modes as a fifth mode. Weiss admits that this is unavoidable as long as the modes are really separated out in analysis, but that such a fifth mode reduces immediately to a point of insignificance since the modes immediately re-establish their interconnection and account for one another. Though the theory is not worked out in detail, and the suggestions are tentative and sometimes inconsistent, they do provide clues as to how the required theory could be provided.—W. G. E.