The ‘Problem of Unconceived Alternatives’ – essentially the idea that we can never know when a radically different but better explanation is available – goes to the heart of what is involved in trying to understand the cosmos given our limited capacities for observation, and the challenges of interpreting the data. This article rethinks large-scale cosmological interpretation (in effect, ‘metaphysics’) as a process of modelling ‘protectorates’ of past experience in terms of ‘typicalities’ found in our own local range of empirical data, and then of making it available as a tool for understanding and prediction. Based on the role of examples and analogies (dṛṣṭānta) to build ontologies explaining the cosmos in the history of Indian metaphysics, it argues for a broadly structural realist account. When we ask whether something is a physical object, a material, a force, a field, or some other as-yet-unconceived kind of thing, we use best-fit models that are schematic of the structure of evidence, rather than descriptive of the thing in itself. Given this, Indian metaphysical history suggests strategies for finding unconceived alternative better explanatory models, by stretching the imagination towards novel schemas. In this light, the ‘problem’ becomes a ‘promise’ that unconceived alternatives with ever-better explanatory power await us, subject to more innovative, imaginative interpretations.

In recent years, the question of naturalism in the study of religions has been increasingly debated. Primarily, these discussions converge in the widely held view that naturalism is the only way for religious studies as an academic enterprise to exclude supernaturalist assumptions from its methodology. While I fully agree with this view, I argue that naturalism is usually formulated with the help of metaphysical assumptions, which are problematically embodied in the location problem, that is, the problem of how to locate certain phenomena, such as meanings and values, in the order of nature. By unfolding the dynamic between the elements of the location problem, I show that the kind of naturalism based on Wittgenstein’s thought prevents the location problem from arising and can serve as a balanced version of naturalism for use in the study of religion. While metaphysical naturalism often leads to dilemmas, within Wittgenstein’s kind of naturalism, it seems possible both to maintain anti-supernaturalism in the study of religion and to resist the metaphysical temptations hidden in our assumptions about language. These two features make Wittgenstein’s naturalism truly methodological.

Although many contemporary theologians and philosophers of religion distinguish between ‘idolatry’ in a general sense and ‘conceptual idolatry’ as a distinct error, close attention to theorists of idolatry shows that ‘conceptual idolatry’ should not be considered distinct from idolatry proper. After discussing the relation between concepts and idolatry in key thinkers from the phenomenological and grammatical traditions, this article discusses analytic attempts to understand idolatry, showing how each falls short.

Ultimately, attention to the category of ‘conceptual idolatry’ shows the deficiencies present in contemporary framings of idolatry simpliciter. This article concludes with a proposal for a new framework by which to understand the dispute about idolatry: turning away from the question of whether we are worshipping the right God, towards the question of how God might (and might not) become apt to human thought and speech.

This essay considers the philosophy of Tommaso Campanella by examining it in light of a metaphysics conceived from the relationship between history, science, and experience. The desire to reform scientific knowledge beyond Aristotelian boundaries, integrating history and experience as the foundations of science, leaves Campanella’s philosophy still steeped in the logical distinctions between natural science and metaphysics. After all, Campanella positioned the entire philosophy of nature as an intermediate knowledge capable of uniting logic and metaphysics. Nevertheless, his metaphysics breathes the cultural atmosphere of early modernity, which, while referencing the past, looks towards a future still uncertain, balancing between ancient concepts and new meanings that will eventually be attributed to the vocabulary of modern metaphysical language.

The humanist theory of the nude is one of the places where what can be called a ‘poor metaphysics’ developed during the Renaissance. To construct the concept of the nude as a representation of man in his own right, art theorists used common scholastic categories such as substance and accident, form and matter, potentiality and actuality, quantity and quality, whole and part, soul and body. Resolutely poor in its object – the human body, the work of art – and in its form – technical treatise, fictional dialogue, or simple working notes – this reflection is nonetheless rich and original because of what constitutes its very weakness: the contamination of the Aristotelian metaphysical tradition with Neoplatonism, Vitruvianism, elements of natural philosophy, musical theory, and even Kabbalah. It testifies less to the permanence of scholastic metaphysics during the Renaissance than to the ingenious adaptation of its tools to new, humbler, and more rebellious objects of thought.