Description
Book SynopsisMetaphysics asks questions about existence: for example, do numbers really exist? Metametaphysics asksquestions about metaphysics: for example, do its questions have determinate answers? If so, are these answers deep and important, or are they merely a matter of how we use words? What is the proper methodology for their resolution? These questions have received a heightened degree of attention lately with new varieties of ontological deflationism and pluralism challenging the kind of realism that has become orthodoxy in contemporary analytic metaphysics. This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline. It brings together many of the central figures in the debate with their most recent work on the semantics, epistemology, and methodology of metaphysics.
Trade ReviewMetametaphysics is an excellent collection of papers about the nature and methodology of metaphysics written by the subject's movers and shakers. It will be of great interest to anyone enamored, repulsed, or mystified by metaphysics. * Philosophical Review *
Even if you're not a metaphysician - indeed, even if you're deeply suspicious of metaphysics - Metametaphysics is interesting.... Metametaphysics hosts a debate that is much more nuanced than a simple 'skeptics vs. enthusiasts' dichotomy. Skepticism about metaphysics can take different forms and come in different degrees. It is also, unsurprisingly, resistible in a variety of ways. Metametaphysics develops many of the central issues in this dialectic, making it essential reading, not just for the metaphysician, but for the skeptic about metaphysics as well. * Elizabeth Barnes, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
Table of Contents1. Introduction: A Guided Tour of Metametaphysics ; 2. Composition, Colocation, and Metaontology ; 3. Ontological Anti-Realism ; 4. Carnap and Ontological Pluralism ; 5. The Question of Ontology ; 6. The Metaontology of Abstraction ; 7. Superficialism in Ontology ; 8. Ontology and Alternative Languages ; 9. Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics ; 10. Ways of Being ; 11. Metaphysics after Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks? ; 12. On What Grounds What ; 13. Ontological Realism ; 14. Ontology, Analyticity, and Meaning: The Quine-Carnap Dispute ; 15. Answerable and Unanswerable Questions ; 16. Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment ; 17. Must Existence-Questions Have Answers?
