The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics

Robin Le Poidevin, Simons Peter, McGonigal Andrew, Ross P. Cameron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415396318
• eBook ISBN: 9781134155859
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics is an outstanding, comprehensive and accessible guide to the major themes, thinkers, and issues in metaphysics. The Companion features over fifty specially commissioned chapters from international scholars which are organized into three clear parts:

• History of Metaphysics
• Ontology
• Metaphysics and Science.

Each section features an introduction which places the range of essays in context, while an extensive glossary allows easy reference to key terms and definitions. The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics is essential reading for students of philosophy and anyone interested in surveying the central topics and problems in metaphysics from causation to vagueness and from Plato and Aristotle to the present-day.

Part I
HISTORY OF METAPHYSICS

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

Millennia of metaphysics

Peter Simons

Metaphysics traces its ancestry to ancient Greek civilisation. Centuries before the idea of metaphysics was outlined by Aristotle, longer still before it got the name “metaphysics,” Presocratic philosophers speculated about the nature of the world, what it was made of, and according to what principles it developed. Metaphysics is thus one of the oldest branches of thought, and despite several attempts to remove it, retains a place in philosophy.

Whereas the Presocratics from Ionia concerned themselves with the nature of the observable natural world, attempting natural rather than supernatural explanations, the Eleatic philosophers Parmenides and Zeno offered logical arguments to demonstrate that reality is one and unchanging, so the physical world we observe must be mere appearance, while the Pythagoreans contended that the principles of the world are not material things but numbers.

This opposition between the physical or natural world (physis means “nature” in Greek) and the world of the eternal or unchanging has been a dominant theme in Western metaphysics ever since. Plato compromised by admitting change and plurality to the perceptible world, but ascribing to it a lower reality, derivative from a realm of unchanging ideas or forms, which possess greater reality and provide the patterns to which the perceived world imperfectly conforms. But Plato’s student Aristotle rejected separate eternal forms and took an object’s form to be in it, so located in space and time and part of physical reality.

Another major division that early caught, and thereafter held, the attention of metaphysicians was whether the human mind, spirit or soul was itself part of the natural world, or whether it could somehow stand apart. Again Plato stoked the controversy by holding that the soul is strictly eternal and immortal, communing with the forms, but is temporarily shackled to the material body during life. Aristotle characteristically held the soul to be in the human body as its form. The issue whether there is one, two or even three fundamental subdivisions of things (material, mental, ideal) has still to receive a consensual resolution.

It was Aristotle who first explicitly separated the branch of knowledge now known as metaphysics. He called it “first philosophy,” to distinguish it from second philosophy or the theory of nature (physics). Metaphysics is variously characterized by him as the science of being qua being, of first principles and causes, and of the divine. Unlike other branches of knowledge, which concern themselves with part of what there is, metaphysics is universal: it is about absolutely everything, not with every detail, but only those matters which all things share. It was only some centuries later (first century CE) that Aristotle’s highly compressed texts, probably lecture notes, were put together by his editors and dubbed “the works coming after the works on nature” (ta meta ta physika), from which cataloguing tag the subject received its name. Surprisingly, the more appropriate “ontology,” meaning “science of being,” was only coined in the seventeenth century by German scholastics.

Most of Western philosophy before the rise of modern natural science stood in the shadow of Plato or Aristotle. The man regarded as the first medieval philosopher, the Irishman Johannes Scotus Eriugena (ninth century), took many of his ideas from Plato. Aristotle’s works were initially better known in the Islamic world, and the great medieval commentators al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes wrote in Arabic. When their works and the Greek originals were eventually translated into Latin, Europe caught up, and the apogee of Aristotelian influence coincided with the rise and spread of universities in Europe. The great scholastic philosophers Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham were at once Aristotle scholars and metaphysicians in their own right, pursuing their metaphysical differences under the guise of disagreements about what Aristotle meant. At the same time medieval Christian metaphysics benefited from the urgent need to provide sound intellectual underpinnings to difficult points of Christian dogma, including the Holy Trinity, Christ’s Incarnation, the transubstantiation of bread and wine at communion, the freedom of individuals despite divine foreknowledge, the status of the soul after death and before resurrection, and whether God could be rationally proved to exist.

Metaphysics began its long slide from intellectual pre-eminence with the coming of modern natural science. Galileo expressly set his new world-system against that of the Aristotelians. René Descartes promised to found knowledge not on authority or tradition but on self-evidence. It was Descartes who both returned to Plato’s emphasis on a priori rational justification and gave the opposition between mind and matter its modern urgency, though Descartes’ dualism was strenuously opposed by the materialist Thomas Hobbes. The stress on the a priori was carried further by Spinoza, who contended one could infer the nature of reality by logical deduction from self-evident axioms. By contrast, the role of experience in our knowledge was stressed by John Locke, who, while he shared many assumptions with Descartes, emphasized the importance of reflecting on our intellectual capacities and the way we attain knowledge, initiating the critical and introspective attitude to metaphysical claims that peaked with Kant but has never thereafter lost its importance to metaphysics. Locke’s inconsistencies were exposed by George Berkeley, whose anti-materialist metaphysics was carried further by the greatest of all critics of metaphysics (as of other intellectual pretensions) David Hume. Hume’s ironical injunction to burn all books of “divinity or school [i.e., scholastic] metaphysics” for being neither mathematics nor natural science, and so containing “nothing but sophistry and illusion,” haunts all subsequent metaphysics.

Until the rise of modern natural science there were two major sources of knowledge carrying the stamp of official and academic approval: divine revelation (as interpreted by the church) and, second to this, the authority of ancient philosophers. Experimental and mathematically formulated natural science threatened and in many cases supplanted these sources. Aristotle’s physics was shown to be fundamentally flawed, and the authority of the church was challenged by the Reformation. While Newton and Leibniz, like nearly all their contemporaries, believed in God, their God increasingly had to conform to the discerned patterns of nature rather than the other way around. Enlightenment thinkers across Europe stressed the autonomy of human knowledge, and God began to be pushed into the metaphysical corner.

Hume’s challenge to the claims of metaphysics could not remain unanswered. One native Scottish answer was to stress the literal truth and reliability of most of our everyday beliefs, by contrast with Hume’s sparse and flawed Berkeleyan metaphysics of ideas. A more radical answer was provided by the erstwhile rationalist Immanuel Kant, who safeguarded a priori metaphysics by withdrawing its claims to be about an independently existing real world in itself (an sich), instead confining it to the critical examination of knowledge dealing with the world as we experience it. On Kant’s account, this is principally formed by us, rendering space and time “forms of intuition” and the basic kinds or categories not divisions of the an sich but concepts we employ to turn our experience into knowledge.

Kant’s position was unstable, retaining as it did a last an sich remnant of unknowable reality. His German successors replaced this by an all-encompassing creative mind, culminating in Hegel’s systematic vision of a unified rational and spiritual universe, understandable from within by a priori insight. Hegel’s grandiose pretensions echoed through nineteenth-century philosophy, but were quickly dismissed in his native Germany, where the sceptical stance of Hume and other British empiricists inspired philosophers to turn to the natural sciences for their knowledge, and a generation of philosophers–scientists from Weber and Kirchhoff to Helmholtz and Mach followed the Frenchman Auguste Comte in confining their claims to those which could be experientially justified. Comte envisaged thought advancing from theology via metaphysics to “positive” science, augmented by the rising sciences of psychology and sociology. Darwin’s theory of evolution at last provided a naturalistic explanation for those aspects of reality which had seemed to call for a supernatural designer–creator. Darwin’s ideas were taken up enthusiastically by German philosophy’s great debunker Friedrich Nietzsche, whose disdain for metaphysics (his own metaphysics of centres of power notwithstanding) was surpassed only by his disdain for religion.

The sceptical attitude to metaphysics did not prevail among the philosophy professors, however. In Germany, a “back-to-Kant” movement gathered momentum, while British metaphysicians such as Francis Herbert Bradley belatedly discovered the German idealists. Absolute idealism and Spencer’s Darwinian “synthetic philosophy” provided an eclectic but metaphysically vibrant background to the new realism of Moore and Russell at the turn of the twentieth century. While Moore sought to escape idealism, whether Berkeleyan or Hegelian, Russell was concerned to refute Bradleyan monism, using the new mathematical logic. The philosophy of mathematics, despite steady progress in rigorization through the nineteenth century, had, following Georg Cantor’s invention of set theory, been plagued by a series of paradoxes, culminating in Russell’s paradox of the set of sets which are not elements of themselves. Russell discovered that the German mathematician Gottlob Frege had refined his logic to the point where the paradox could be rigorously derived as a theorem, undermining Frege’s attempt to show arithmetic to be extended logic.

While Moore and Russell were preoccupied with providing solid foundations for ethics and mathematics, respectively, students of the German neo-Aristotelian Franz Brentano ventured anew into metaphysics, under the titles “theory of objects” (Alexius Meinong) or “formal ontology” (Edmund Husserl). Russell’s underpinning to the new logic, developed partly in opposition to Meinong, was logical atomism, a realist metaphysics of facts and their parts. This was refined by Russell’s student Wittgenstein, who coupled an austere world of independent atomic facts with a severe critique of attempts to “say anything metaphysical” as nonsense. Wittgenstein’s strictures were taken up in interwar Vienna by the Vienna Circle, an interdisciplinary group around Moritz Schlick, and the Circle put flesh on Wittgenstein’s bare bones by classifying all statements as “meaningless” if they could not be verified. This enhancement of empiricistic positivism with the tools of modern logic, especially by Rudolf Carnap, put the brakes on metaphysics, which had enjoyed a brief heyday in the 1920s with systematic treatises by Samuel Alexander, John McTaggart and Alfred North Whitehead. The European political situation soon scattered the logical positivists, and they, together with foreign visitors to Vienna such as W. V. Quine and A. J. Ayer, spread their anti-metaphysical brand of linguistic analysis abroad.

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, positivism and the metaphysically deflationary ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, Ryle and Austin kept metaphysics subdued. From mid-century onwards, however, things began to change. Quine combined pragmatist naturalism with a denial of any separation of philosophy from science. His logical criterion of ontological commitment re-awoke interest in ontology, although his own attitude to metaphysics was distinctly light touch, favouring a schematic structural ontology supported only by an interlocking network of beliefs, lightly secured by experiential evidence. A more traditional idea re-emerged with Peter Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics, a Kantian project to determine a priori the perennial conceptual scheme we need to make sense of the world we find. The positivists’ verifiability criterion of meaningfulness was found to be self-defeating, and Karl Popper’s similar falsifiability criterion separated, not sense from nonsense, but science from meaningful non-science, including metaphysics. In time Popper came to embrace an ebullient “three-world” metaphysics of physical, mental and abstract things, echoing similar ideas of Frege, and even earlier, Bernard Bolzano.

Although one strand of analytic philosophy gave home to the most stringent anti-metaphysics, other forms of philosophy from phenomenology to post-structuralism have been equally anti-metaphysical. Indeed it is within analytic philosophy that metaphysics has experienced its strongest comeback. Issues of mind and modality have driven much of this. Australian materialism rescued metaphysical discussion of the mind–body problem, while the mental characteristics of intentionality and consciousness have resisted attempts at naturalization. The semantics of modal logic and the widespread adoption of the concept of possible worlds have fuelled intense discussion as to how realistically such talk should be interpreted. The frank modal realism of David Lewis constitutes the late twentieth century’s most systematic metaphysical project. Meanwhile, classical metaphysical problems such as universals, free will, mathematical Platonism, and the metaphysical implications of causation, laws of nature, and truth have spawned a wide range of debates about metaphysical issues, no longer carried on in the shadow of anxiety about meaninglessness. At the beginning of the twentieth-first century, metaphysics appears to be enjoying an astonishing golden age.

1
PRESOCRATIC THEMES

Being, not-being and mind

David Sedley

Introduction

European philosophy started life as speculative science. The remarkable pantheon of Greek thinkers classed as “Presocratic” on the ground that they are philosophically antecedent to Socrates (BC 469–399) treated the world itself as their primary explanandum. But deep questions concerning the world’s physical structure turned out to be inseparable from still deeper ones about what it is to be a discrete thing, what being entails, and whether there is any parallel role for its negative counterpart, not-being. In what follows, it should be borne in mind that, although all the thinkers we will be considering wrote one or more books, none of those books survives intact. Their thought must be reconstructed from fragments (purportedly verbatim quotations) and other testimonies. This makes an alread...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• General introduction: what is metaphysics?
• Part I History of metaphysics
• Part II Ontology: On What Exists
• Part III Metaphysics and Science
• A Short Glossary of Metaphysics
• Index