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KAVANAUGH, Leslie Jaye. The Architectonic of Philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. vii + 340 pp. Paper, $45.00-The guiding idea of this work is that the analysis of the systemic ('architectural') implications of selected concepts from Plato's, Aristotle's, and Leibniz's thought helps make explicit the ontology underlying their respective philosophic systems, or even the many ontological structures underlying the whole of Western metaphysics (p. 2). The goal of the analysis is to provide a new "architectonic" of being called "the reticulum" (p. 265). According to the author, understanding the world in terms of a "system of reticulance" (sic; p. 275) may help overcome the various ontological problems left open by Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and Kant, mainly the "hierarchical," "transcendent," "monocentric," and apparently altogether "static" aspects of their system's metaphysical foundations.
The unearthing of ancient and early modern metaphysical presuppositions is to be achieved via a reconstruction of particular aspects of these philosophies, aspects deemed central to their respective, explicit or implicit, theories of Being. Borrowing a Derridian term which translates Heidegger's notion of Seinstopologie (from "The Thinker as Poet," 1954), the author calls the method pursued "onto-topology." This is defined as an inquiry into "the location of Being" as opposed to the classical inquiry into the "whatness" or the meaning of Being. By "locatiom" or "place" of Being the author sometimes intends Being's logical relations to other metaphysical categories, and at other times the situatedness of "Being" in the Heideggerian sense of Dasein, namely, regarding the human being (see p. 265).
According to the author, the fundamental principle at work...