Introduction: The Foundations of a New Enlightenment

This book’s title refers to its core idea: there are bonds holding together the manifold phenomena that make up all the concrete things we encounter in the everyday world, and imposing constraints on the variations of these phenomena, by violating which things cease to be what they are. These bonds are given, that is, discovered and not constructed; by virtue of them, things are better or worse examples of their kinds: more or less well-grown fruits, vital animals, useful artifacts, effective institutions, and more or less accomplished human beings. “Given” bonds are a gift in so far as they are sources of lawfulness in natural and social events: they lend customs and familiar patterns to what we call the real world by letting processes of all sorts unfold according to pretty typical and predictable styles. They are also a gift, in so far as they are sources of normativity (of all sorts) for human action, or at least limits to the arbitrariness of human wills, limits that human freedom indeed can and does violate: but they are at least constraints on the meaningfulness of positive norms. Their cognition is what philosophy is about.