Quo Vadis, Metaphysics?

Essays in Honor of Peter van Inwagen

Mirosław Szatkowski

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783110662498
• eBook ISBN: 9783110662641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

The old philosophical discipline of metaphysics – after having been pronounced dead by many – has enjoyed a significant revival within the last thirty years, due to the application of the methods of analytic philosophy. One of the major contributors to this revival is the outstanding American metaphysician Peter van Inwagen. This volume brings together twenty-two scholars, who, in commemoration of Prof. van Inwagen's 75th birthday, ponder the future prospects of metaphysics in all the richness to which it has now returned. It is only natural that logical and epistemological reflections on the significance of metaphysics – sometimes called "meta-metaphysics" – play a considerable role in most of these papers. The volume is further enriched by an interview with Peter van Inwagen himself.

Part I:Peter van Inwagen Profile

Mirosław Szatkowski and Peter van Inwagen

Interview with Peter van Inwagen

1

Mirosław Szatkowski:

Peter, you told me in one of your e-mails that metaphysics is not only the passion of your life, but something more – it is the love of your life.3How did you find this love? What were the beginnings of your fascination with metaphysics?

Peter van Inwagen:

When I was starting out in philosophy, when I was, so to speak, beginning to be a philosopher, I should have described my interests as centered not on “metaphysics” but on certain philosophical problems: the problem of free will and determinism, the problem of fictional existence, the nature of modality.4As time passed, however, I began to use the term ‘metaphysics’ to tie the members of this rather diverse set of problems together. (As I became interested in further problems – the nature of material objects and their relations to their parts, the problem of identity across time, the problem of nominalism and realism –, I continued to use the word ‘metaphysics’ as a general term to tie the problems I was interested in together. I do not think that I became interested in these further problems because someone had classified them as belonging to ‘metaphysics’.) But why did I use that word? This is a hard question to answer because it is not at all clear what it means to classify a philosophical problem as metaphysical. I had long been aware that ‘metaphysics’ and ‘metaphysical’ were problematical terms, but I did not fully appreciate how problematical they were till a few years ago when I began to write the article “Metaphysics” for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Even when I had not seriously thought about any other philosophical problem than the problem of free will and determinism, I described my interest in that problem as “metaphysical”. (Or perhaps I said, “I’m interested in the metaphysical problem of free will and determinism” – implying that there was more than one philosophical problem that could be called ‘the problem of free will and determinism’ and that I was interested in the one that was metaphysical.) I said this because I believed that determinism – the thesis that only one future is consistent with the present state of things and the laws of nature (or the laws of physics) – was a metaphysical thesis and that any problem that essentially involved determinism was therefore a metaphysical problem.

But what did I mean by saying that determinism was a metaphysical thesis? That would be hard to say. I think it’s clear what the, as one might say, phenomenology of my choosing that term was. Most other writers on the problem of free will and determinism did not think of determinism in the very abstract way that I did – or so at least it appeared to me. They were not thinking in terms of “the laws of nature” or “the laws of physics”. They had not had scientific educations – not even the first few stages of a scientific education that I had had. They had never had to answer examination questions like, “An artillery piece is fired at an elevation of 37 degrees. The muzzle velocity of the shell is 2000 meters/second. What will the position and velocity of the shell be ten seconds later? (Neglect air resistance and the rotation of the earth.).” I could see that these examination questions had answers – as, of course, examination questions should. I could see that (neglecting air resistance and the rotation of the earth, to be sure), Newton’s laws of motion and assumption that the acceleration due to gravity near the surface of the earth is a given that does not vary from case to case jointly implied that the elevation of a gun and the muzzle velocity of a shell fired from it were together sufficient to determine the position and velocity of the shell at any moment between the moment the gun was fired and the moment of impact.

Determinism, as I saw determinism, was a generalization of and abstraction from the fact that certain questions have answers – the questions about the evolution of physical systems that constitute such a high proportion of the exercises that one finds at the ends of the chapters in physics textbooks. (That is to say: the author of the text gives the student some numbers that describe the state of a system at one time and expects the student to produce some numbers that describe its state at some later time.) The generalization, however, and the abstraction are extreme, and their extremity takes one outside science. In making this generalization one quantifies over laws of physics and the physical quantities that occur in them – over real laws of physics, God’s-eye laws of physics, which may well be radically different from any of those principles that scientists and engineers of the present day use to grind out numbers that characterize the behavior of projectiles and planets and protons. And quantifying over real, God’s-eye, laws of physics is not something that is done “within” the science of physics or within any other science. It was because my approach to the problem of free will and determinism had this sort of “feel” that I described it as ‘metaphysical’. (As opposed to what? Well, as opposed to ‘psychological’, ‘linguistic’, ‘commonsensical’, ‘ethical’ – all words I used to describe the approaches to the problem of free will and determinism that I found in the work of various other writers.)

The preceding two paragraphs were an attempt to describe what was in my mind when I said that the determinism I was interested in was “metaphysical” determinism. (Other philosophers might use the word ‘determinism’ as a name for – say – the thesis that human action is determined to occur by the agent’s desires and beliefs at the moment just prior to that action. That sort of thesis wasn’t ... well, metaphysical enough to engage my refined interest.) Perhaps this attempt was successful and perhaps not, but it was certainly not much help with the question, What did I mean by calling the kind of determinism I was interested in “metaphysical” determinism. After all, that question has an answer only insofar as I did mean something by ‘metaphysical’, and it’s not now evident to me that there was anything much I meant by the word – or anything much beyond this: a philosophical thesis is metaphysical if (i) it can’t be assigned with confidence to any other part of philosophy, and (ii) it involves a very high level of abstraction.

And what, if anything, do I mean by ‘metaphysics’ now? I have no interesting answer to this question. For an extended exploration of the question ‘What does “metaphysics” mean?’ (and for some difficulties I now see in an earlier attempt of mine to answer this question), see the article in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that I mentioned above.

What keeps me interested in the questions I call metaphysical (beyond the interest each of them has for me individually, in and of itself : I just am interested in the problem of identity across time; I just am interested in the question whether there are abstract objects), is that the attempt to answer them seems in every case to involve a certain kind of thinking (there is a certain kind of thinking such that, in every case of a question I call metaphysical, when I attempt to answer that question I find myself engaging in that kind of thinking). It seems, moreover, that only the questions I call metaphysical call for that kind of thinking. I will attempt to describe the nature of this kind of thinking in my answer to question (5). Here I want to say something that is not about its nature but about what it is like to engage in it. I will do this by contrasting it with another kind of philosophical thinking that I have some experience of. Most of my philosophical thinking that is not about metaphysics belongs to Christian apologetic. (Which does not of course imply that none of my apologetic thinking is metaphysical thinking – that would be false.) This thinking could be looked upon as being in the service of “applied philosophy”. (When apologetic is done by a philosopher, it is generally fair to describe it as applied philosophy.) It is the kind of thinking one does when one is defending an ethical or political or aesthetic or religious position that one considers particularly important against some reasoned attack by an opponent of that position. A good example of the kind of thinking I have in mind can be found in my papers “Non Est Hick” and “Critical Studies of the New Testament and Users of the New Testament”. If Christianity is not the illusion most philosophers suppose it to be, what I have done in these and other essays of the same type may well be – depending on how good it is and whom it has reached – more important, perhaps vastly more important, than my work in metaphysics. But it is clear to me from my own experience of engaging in the kind of thinking that goes into these essays that that thinking does not engage the full resources of my mind. And that is not what I would say of the kind of thinking on display, for good or ill, in Material Beings or the essays collected in Ontology, Identity, and Modality and Existence: Essays in Ontology. Only when I am thinking about matters like “the special composition question” or Lewis’s modal ontology or Putnam’s criticisms of Quine’s ontological method do I feel that my mind is fully awake. (I do not identify myself with my mind; I am not saying that I am fully awake only when I am engaged in metaphysical thinking. One in fact doesn’t want one’s mind to be fully awake any very high proportion of the time – if for no other reason, because when one’s mind is fully awake, one’s capacities for interacting with other human beings in all sorts of important ways will be asleep. If the Good Samaritan’s mind had been fully awake when he was on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, he would have been too wrapped up in his own thoughts even to have noticed the man who had fallen among thieves.) And this sort of thinking is addictive. I hope that when I am no longer able to do it, I shall be aware of this fact and able gracefully to stop trying to it. Till then, however, I have no choice but to continue indulging my addiction.

Having re-read what I have just written, it occurs to me that it may well be that I call a question metaphysical just in the case that my attempt to answer it involves the kind of thinking I have been trying to describe.

2

Mirosław Szatkowski:

You are the author of 6 books and over 200 articles. How would you characterize your work? Which problems have especially absorbed you? What answers have you given. What is your contribution to the edifice of metaphysics?

Peter van Inwagen:

I think I did as much as anyone to undermine the view that was the consensus on the problem of free will in the middle sixties when I began graduate studies in philosophy. This view was that the problem of free will was a solved problem. And the solution was ‘compatibilism’: the thesis that free will and determinism are compatible (because ‘X was able to do otherwise’ means something conditional, something along the general lines of, ‘X would have done otherwise if X had chosen to do otherwise’).

I think also that I left the problem of free will and determinism clearer, more precisely stated, than I found it. (It saddens me that those now working on the problem of free will and determinism are, or a significant proportion of them are, engaged in simply throwing all that hard-won clarity away. If one examines a really clear piece of writing on the problem of free will and determinism – for example, David Lewis’s great essay, “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” – and the kind of thing that makes up no small part of what is written about free will and determinism today, the contrast is astonishing.)

I attach some importance to my defense of an “abstractionist” modal ontology – and particularly to my reply to David Lewis’s charge that anyone who claims so much as to understand the language in which abstractionists frame their modal ontology is in effect claiming to possess magical powers of understanding.

I think that I did as much as anyone to create “the problem of material constitution”. And I was certainly the philosopher who brought the “Special Composition Question” to the attention of the philosophers who were working on material constitution (despite the fact that I was not the first philosopher to formulate the question).

I think I have had some important things to say certain problems about the identity of things and persons across time. I think that some of the things I have said about the concept of a temporal part and about the psychological-continuity theory of personal identity are worth paying attention to.

I believe I am responsible for metaphysicians’ having come to think in terms of a distinction between ‘ontology’ and ‘meta-ontology’ – ontology being the discipline that asks the question ‘What is there?’ and meta-ontology being the discipline that asks the question, “What are we asking when we ask ‘What is there?’?”

3

Mirosław Szatkowski:

Which metaphysical issues remain open? What areas of research would you recommend to future generations?

Peter van Inwagen:

At the turn of the millennium, I should have recommended that metaphysicians pay serious attention to the field I dubbed ‘meta-ontology’. Happily, no such recommendation is now necessary. I hope that the current lively debates about meta-ontology (such as those on display in the 2009 collection Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology) will continue and deepen.

I hope that in the coming decades, metaphysicians will devote considerably more time than they so far have to the topic of the relative merits of constituent and relational ontologies.

Constituent ontologies are ontologi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Declaration of the Establishment of the International Society for Formal Ontology
• The Founding Members of the International Society for Formal Ontology
• Introduction
• Part I Peter van Inwagen – A Profile
• Part II The Grounds and Ways of Metaphysics
• Part III Existence, Nonexistence, and Contradiction
• Part IV Composition, Organisms, and Persons
• Part V Abstract Beings, Nominalism, and Infinity
• Part VI God, Theodicy, and the Best World
• Authors of Contributed Papers
• Person Index
• Subject Index