This Town: A Complete Metaphysics

By Thomas O. Scarborough and B. Ann Moore

Like Thomas Scarborough's previous book Everything, Briefly (2022), This Town, too, is a metaphysics. However, it adopts the form of a story, which "concretizes" abstract thought. A narrator visits a pre-modern town, where he engages with various people: an old man, a young woman, the chief, and other townsfolk. The method of "concretization" brings a metaphysics down to the level of teens and up--covering core issues of language, reality, ethics, politics, science, math, meaning, holism, and God (this town believes in God). The focus is primarily on how these various areas of philosophy and life may be integrated into one, harmonious whole. This Town serves as an excellent introduction not merely to philosophy, but to philosophical thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Oct 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666783421

Thomas O. Scarborough

Thomas O. Scarborough is a minister and ex UK top ten philosophy editor. He holds two postgraduate degrees in three fields: theology, linguistics, and global leadership (covering, also, global dynamics and global thought). Published in peer-reviewed journals in six fields, he is an inventor and prize-winning designer. His innovations include RFL-class logic and CCO-class metal detectors.

Book preview

Preface

In 2022 , Wipf & Stock ambitiously published my metaphysics, Everything, Briefly —a panoramic, systematic philosophy. This is arguably the first new metaphysics of our generation. Some say that there has been no new metaphysics since Kant and Hegel.

While preparing Everything, Briefly, I compared its features with a wide range of metaphysics. The simplest of these was Descartes’ Meditations, which was readable from about eighteen years of age and up. Everything Briefly is easier than this. Nonetheless, it is a complex work: about 110,000 words, 800 footnotes, and 500 references, among other things.

This Town does away with all that, and adopts the form of a story. It concretizes abstract thought. If one believes the computer analysis, it is readable from about nine years and up. More realistically, I would think, by high school students. This is a major departure from all previous metaphysics.

While it is written as an illustrated novelette, it is, in an important sense, a true metaphysics. It covers core issues of language, reality, ethics, esthetics, political philosophy, history, science, mathematics, meaning, holism, and God. From this point of view, it may serve as an introduction to philosophical thought in general.

I have called it a trialog. This is because there are, in a sense, three major conversational partners in each section: two people and their environment.

Thomas O. Scarborough

Cape Town, August 2023.

Chapter 1

Language

I walked into the town and took off my hat. There were insects dancing in the evening sun. I looked around me at wooden dwellings on round stilts, standing on cleanly swept surroundings. Children were playing in the tropical heat. A rooster crowed.

An old man with a wispy gray beard was standing at the side of the road. I hadn’t noticed him at first.

This town is tidy, I said.

Good evening, he said. He paused.

I perceive that you speak very good English, he said. People don’t realize how difficult it is to form the simplest sentence.

How so? I asked.

It is quite clear, he said, "that you know your subject from your predicate! First, your subject: ‘This town’. Then, your predicate: ‘is tidy’.

It is quite clear, he said, "that you know

your subject from your predicate!"

"You know, too, when to use declarative speech. You avoided the use of interrogative, imperative, and—arguably, I should add—exclamatory speech. Imagine that you had ordered me, ‘Tidy this town!’" and he laughed.

Another thing, he said. "You couldn’t have told me that this town was tidy, or had been tidy. You haven’t been here before! You weren’t there to see it! And to say, ‘This town will be tidy . . . ’"

I would have to be a prophet, I said.

The old man smiled—and looked at me as if to discern whether, indeed, I was.

He regaled me for a long time with the subtleties and complexities of my opening words. I forgot to mention the indicative! he said. And then, Did I mention syntax?

Yet as he spoke, I felt a growing discomfort with what he said.

He continued.

He strayed into phonology, morphology, and psycho-linguistics—even human biology.

He paused. All these aspects of language, he said, fit together and overlap in magnificent combination. All feed into your perfectly formed words, ‘This town is tidy.’

No, no! I said. You’ve got it all wrong!

No sooner had I said it, than I wanted to take back my words. I had spoken truthfully, but I had spoken unkindly.

You spoke well, I said. But it seemed so completely out of keeping with what I think I was doing, when I spoke those words.

How could you have been doing anything else? he asked.

"It begins with the whole world," I said.

When I take the word ‘town’, I said, "I reduce the whole world to a small region of the planet—a town.

When I speak of a town, I am not speaking of a forest, or a canyon, or a lake. For that matter, I am not speaking of anything else in the world. Naturally, I speak about a human habitation that is not as big as a city. Now we have taken the whole world, and reduced to this town.

Aha, said the old man. "I think I see. And to be sure that we do not think of any other town, you used the word ‘this’—‘This town’—which reduces all towns to just one—this one. You could have spoken of any one of the thousands of towns that lie beyond our mountains and rivers. But it’s our tidy little town."

But wait a moment, he said. "What can ‘tidy’ have to do with the whole world? Our words reduce the world, you say. But ‘tidy’ is a reduction of nothing! It means that our town is neat. It is orderly. Your scheme fails!"

First, I spoke about this town, I said. "The word ‘tidy’ reduced our conversation to just one aspect of this town.

"See how it is becoming misty now, as the sun sets. This town is misty. Hear the laughter of children through the houses and trees. This town is happy. Now we smell the tropical undergrowth. This town is musty.

I could have spoken about anything under the sun, I said. "I chose to speak