Kripke

2020

This essay examines selected sentiments against Metaphysics by tracing different criticisms against metaphysics, and subsequently presents rebuttals against each antimetaphysics argument. Auguste Compte(1798-1857AD) is herein viewed as among the first philosophers to systematically critique metaphysics with an extrapolation towards positive epistemology or empirical Science. The essay further observes that systematic critique of metaphysics by Comte led to a vehement affirmation of Science by a group of thinkers known as Positivists and logical positivist. They constricted epistemology by classifying knowledge into analytic and synthetic. Any proposition outside the dichotomy of Analytics and Synthetic such as metaphysics is consequently labeled by them as 'meaningless' chatter. The essay also presents en passant the internal strife of a section of Metaphysicians who oppose traditional metaphysics by appealing to a more empirical metaphysics. The peak of antimetaphysics is d...

Scientia - The International Journal on the Liberal Arts

Over the years, many philosophers have proclaimed the death of metaphysics, the death of that area of philosophy concerned with the study of reality as such. But what exactly do they mean by this? What does this death-of-metaphysics idea imply? In this paper, I offer a way to articulate this idea by formulating it as a metametaphysical thesis about the non-substantivity of metaphysical claims. I argue that given this formulation such a metametaphysical thesis seems implausible. References Balog, Katalin. “In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84, (2012): 1-23. Chalmers David, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman, eds. Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundation of Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Chalmers, David. “Verbal Disputes.” The Philosophical Review 120, (2011): 475–513. Chalmers, David. “Ontological Anti-Realism,” in Metametaphysics, 2009, 77-129. Hirsch, Eli. “Quantifier Variance and Realism.” Philosophical Is...

Neoaristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics (Routledge), 2014

This volume re-examines some of the major themes at the intersection of traditional and contemporary metaphysics. The book uses as a point of departure Francisco Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations published in 1597. Minimalist metaphysics in empiricist/pragmatist clothing have today become mainstream in analytic philosophy. Independently of this development, the progress of scholarship in ancient and medieval philosophy makes clear that traditional forms of metaphysics have affinities with some of the streams in contemporary analytic metaphysics. The book brings together leading contemporary metaphysicians to investigate the viability of a neo-Aristotelian metaphysics.

1998

Philosophical Inquiries, 2018

The purpose of the first part of this paper is to examine the major turning point events that transformed the attitude of analytic philosophers towards metaphysical discourse. We will focus on one such turning point, the modal revolution, based on the resources of possible world semantics, developed by Kripke (who devised suitable models for modal logic) and by philosophers such as Lewis and Plantinga (who offered influential metaphysical interpretations of those models). We shall see how the modal revolution, by bringing an unprecedented change in the way in which modal notions were understood by analytic philosophers, was central to the revival of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy. Yet, analytic philosophers encountered serious obstacles in their attempt to understand the ontological and epistemological foundations and implications of one of the most basic notions of the modal revolution, that of a possible world. In the second part of the paper, it will be argued that, surprisingly enough, the work of the pre-Kripkean " middle " analytic philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, especially as interpreted and reconstructed by Robert Brandom, can perhaps throw light on the semantic, epistemic and ontological dimension of possible world talk. Sellars does this mainly through 1) (what Brandom calls) the " Kant-Sellars thesis about modality " , 2) his understanding of modal discourse as non-descriptive, expressive, categorial and " metaliguistic " , and 3) his nominalism about abstract entities. Thus, it will be suggested that the implications of this Sellars-inspired position are such that make it an unexpectedly relevant and novel contribution to contemporary debates in analytic metaphysics.

Philosophia, 2019

I outline a conception of the relation of metaphysics to science, motivated by van Fraassen’s work on philosophical stances, that does justice to the role played by metaphysical assumptions and presuppositions in scientific inquiry, while honouring the anti-metaphysical attitude that has always characterised the empiricist tradition.

Kripke (Naming and Necessity, 2001) is intrigued by the question of whether the scope convention used to eliminate defined descriptions – in On Denoting – is an appropriate solution to give the logical visibility that the sentence, subject to this convention, would be able to confer to its modal, counterfactual interpretations, or its alterations in the context of propositional attitudes . He wants to know if Russellian analysis is capable of preserving basic intuitions about the intellectual construction that a proposition tries to represent when abstracting the types of logical factors . Kripke believes that It does not . In any case, we do not depend on a consensus on the debate about whether rigidity is a semantic convention (and not, as Kripke thought, a representation of the intuitive behavior of language), or whether logical analysis is also a metaphysical position on rigidity. Russell and Kripke's divergence arise from a philosophical rather than a technical disagreement.

International Journal of Humanitatis Theoreticus., 2020

Ever since Hume launched a book-burning campaign against metaphysics, and Kant declared the "end of metaphysics", supported by the Law of Three Stages of Comte and the rejection of metaphysics by the Logical Positivists, we are seen to be living in a post metaphysical era. This paper situates the historical roots of the rejection of metaphysics and then argues forcefully that metaphysics is indispensably relevant in our era. We may theoretically be living after the era of metaphysics, but in practice, in all academic and scientific endeavors, we cannot do without metaphysical presuppositions and assumptions. Those proclaiming the death of metaphysics are in fact valorizing metaphysics since at the base of their arguments are metaphysical principles.