Description
Book SynopsisEvery Thing Must Go argues that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers'' a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science. In addition to showing how recent metaphysics has drifted away from connection with all other serious scholarly inquiry as a result of not heeding this restriction, they demonstrate how to build a metaphysics compatible with current fundamental physics (''ontic structural realism''), which, when combined with their metaphysics of the special sciences (''rainforest realism''), can be used to unify physics with the other sciences without reducing these sciences to physics itself. Taking science metaphysically seriously, Ladyman and Ross argue, means that metaphysicians must abandon the picture of the world as composed of self-subsistent individual objects, and the paradigm of causation as the collision of such objects.Everything
Trade ReviewThis material is dense, challenging and creative...a provovative book...the authors are to be commended for taking on the challenge to develop a systematic, scientifically informed metaphysics for the twenty-first century. * Paul W. Humphreys Metascience *
This challenging and provocative book contends that contemporary fundamental physics carries radically counterintuitive consequences for metaphysics * Jarrett Leplin, Philosophical Papers *
an enticing work * Jeremy Butterfield, Times Literary Supplement *
Table of ContentsPreface ; 1. In Defence of Scientism ; 2. Scientific Realism, Constructive Empiricism and Structuralism ; 3. Ontic Structural Realism and the Philosophy of Physics ; 4. Rainforest Realism and the Unity of Science ; 5. Causation in a Structural World ; 6. Conclusion - Philosophy Enough ; Bibliography
