Kant accepts a form of idealism, which he called *‘transcendental’, saying that space and time were merely forms of experience and had no application to what he called *‘things-in-themse
Trang 1different common features between the terms of a
metaphor Metaphors are interpreted and they are
inter-preted differently by different readers and hearers
Conse-quently, the idea that there can be a literal paraphrase of a
metaphor which preserves its sense is no longer widely
held, for such a literal paraphrase would have to
com-mand common agreement as expressing what the
metaphor means A powerful metaphor like Macbeth’s
‘sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care’ invites us to
join in an exploration of points of similarity and difference
Black, in a later paper, speaks of metaphors as ‘inciting
the hearer’ and likens the process to game-playing Since
this also characterizes the understanding of similes, few
writers would now make a sharp distinction between
metaphor and simile
Black argued that when we read a metaphor like
‘Achilles is a lion’, we read it armed with a number of
commonplace beliefs about ‘lion’; these, metaphorically
applied to Achilles, we draw on as we construe it In
Claudius’ line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘When sorrows
come, they come not single spies, but in battalions’, we
may reflect that spies threaten and undermine, carrying
the fear of worse to follow; battalions, on the other hand,
embody open aggression
One interesting recent contribution in a philosophical
debate that goes back to Aristotle is Donald Davidson’s
rejection of the idea that there is a special sort of *meaning
which metaphors have, over and above the literal
mean-ing Taken literally metaphors seem nonsensical or false
or only trivially true For Davidson, it is the use of
metaphor which is crucial, in making us aware of some
likeness, often surprising, between apparently disparate
things but without asserting that likeness
Metaphors are the growing-points of *language A
cur-sory glance shows just how much of the language of mind
is metaphorical in origin These metaphors die, of course,
and lose their metaphorical force though their origins may
be still visible In recent decades, philosophers have, as
well, become more aware of the role played by metaphor
D E Cooper, Metaphor (Oxford, 1986).
Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn
(Cam-bridge, 1993)
metaphysics, history of Metaphysics is the most abstract
and in some views ‘high-falutin’ part of philosophy,
having to do with the features of ultimate reality, what
really exists and what it is that distinguishes that and
makes it possible Nevertheless, the exact nature of the
subject has been constantly disputed, as indeed has its
validity and usefulness
Philosophy at its very beginnings with the Pre-Socratics
was metaphysical in character, although it was initially
presented in a dress which made it sound more like
physics, as witness Thales’ claim that everything is made
of water Subsequent Pre-Socratics were concerned with
other attempts to understand nature and the possibility of
change within it, although Parmenides argued (for the
first time by means of a formal argument, even if that was given a poetical dress) that coming to be, ceasing to be, and change in general were impossible, so that his succes-sors had to counter his claim, even if they did not fully understand his arguments By the time of Plato, with his theory that the true realities were Forms (or Ideas), abstract exemplars or paradigms, of which sensible things were only imperfect copies, the distinction of metaphysics from physics became clear, since these realities were quite distinct from the world with which physics has its con-cern Since the Forms were also universal in character his theory also initiated metaphysical arguments concerning the status of *universals, something that has gone on ever since
The term ‘metaphysics’ originated, however, as a title
given to some of Aristotle’s works in the catalogue of the edition of them produced by Andronicus of Rhodes in the second half of the first century bc (although it may have come from an earlier library classification) It meant sim-ply the works which followed those on physics in the cata-logue But those works, which were concerned with being, both as such and in respect of various *categories of
it, especially *substance, contain discussions concerning matters which have an obvious continuity with later metaphysical theories Hence it is reasonable to see
Aris-totle’s Metaphysics, untidy though it is in the form in which
it has come down to us, as the first systematic treatise in metaphysics, containing not only discussions of the notion of being and what has the best claim to that title but also criticisms of earlier thought on the subject, particu-larly Plato’s Theory of Forms Those Forms are soundly rejected Aristotle believes in universals, certainly, but they are features of the world itself, which is made up of things with *essences, belonging to a system organized in terms of genera and species The notion of species corres-ponds to that of *form as Aristotle construes that, but material things have not only form but *matter too Among beings, which Aristotle thought were classifiable
in terms of a system of categories, things in the category of substance have the greatest claim to that title, and among them those which are nearest to being pure form God, whose nature is, in Aristotle’s view, pure form, is the high-est kind of substance, and thus the highhigh-est kind of being,
so that what it is for something to be is best seen in God, who comprises the end or goal to which other things tend, and who, as the *prime mover, is also the so-called *final cause of the movements of the heavenly bodies Post-Aristotelian philosophy saw the world as organ-ized under different principles, though the influence of Aristotle was strong Epicurus thought that everything, including ourselves, was composed of atoms moving in a void, and was to be explained in those terms The Stoics,
by contrast, thought of matter as forming a continuum, but subject to rational or so-called ‘seminal’ principles due
to pneuma (breath or spirit), which gives everything life.
Platonism went though many vicissitudes, and at the end
of the period of Greek philosophy took a somewhat mys-tical form in Neoplatonism, led by Plotinus, according to
590 metaphor
Trang 2which the Forms are organized under a unitary principle,
the One At the opposite extreme from this is the world of
matter, responsible by its negativity for evil The mystical
goal is an identification with the One, but it is a goal to be
reached through philosophy, not by any religious process
Nevertheless, Neoplatonic ideas had a considerable
influ-ence on religious thinking, including that of Augustine
Plotinus’ main disciple, Porphyry, wrote on, amongst
other things, the Aristotelian doctrine of categories,
say-ing that the ontological status of species and genera was
uncertain, and Boethius, commenting on that, thereby
transmitted to later medieval thought the problem of the
status of universals, which loomed large throughout that
period
There was considerable argument between schools of
thinking about universals in the early Middle Ages,
between realists (e.g William of Champeaux),
nominal-ists (e.g Roscelin of Compiègne), and conceptualnominal-ists (e.g
perhaps Abelard, although his position on the issue is not
entirely clear), who respectively claimed that what was
general was to be found in nature, words only, or thoughts
only With the rediscovery of Aristotle in the thirteenth
century, after a period of ignorance of his philosophy in
the West, realism about universals became the accepted
view, until a revival of nominalism, particularly with
William of Ockham, in the fourteenth century There
was, however, a connection between the issues over
uni-versals and theological issues, particularly the doctrine of
the Trinity The other main metaphysical concerns of
medieval philosophers were similarly theologically
orien-tated—particularly the existence of God and the nature of
the soul Anselm in the eleventh century became famous
or notorious for his so-called *ontological proof of the
existence of God, maintaining that God’s existence
fol-lowed from the fact that God is that than which no greater
can be conceived The great Thomas Aquinas in the
thir-teenth century took a more Aristotelian line on the
argu-ments for God’s existence, relying in the main on
considerations (which owe much to Aristotle) concerning
the supposed nature of the world which point to the need
to assume the existence of a deity Aquinas also took, with
modifications, an Aristotelian line on the nature of the
soul as the form of the body, provoking questions, not
easily answered, about how this view was to be reconciled
with belief in immortality
After the Renaissance, during which there was a revival
of Platonism, often in other forms of mystical dress,
Descartes initiated a change in the approach to
philoso-phy, although preoccupation with scholastic notions such
as that of substance remained Descartes’s orientation in
philosophy was mainly epistemological in character; it
might indeed be said that his metaphysics was founded on
epistemological considerations For the thesis for which
he has become known—the radical dualism between
mind and body as distinct substances—was founded on
the claim that we have a more direct access to (and
thereby a clearer and more distinct idea of) our minds than
to our bodies His rationalist successors Spinoza and
Leibniz were also very concerned with the *mind–body problem Spinoza maintained that mind and body were to
be construed simply as different aspects of one substance, but that was in a context of argument which was directed
to the conclusion that there can be only one substance, God or nature, and that what we are and what happens to
us is strictly determined because we are modifications of that one substance Spinoza thought, nevertheless, that there was a sense to speaking of freedom which lies in an acceptance of the necessity that the determinism entails Leibniz, by contrast, thought that there was an infinite number of substances, which were simple, though capable of reflecting an infinite number of points of view
He came to think that these substances could only be what
he called *‘monads’, which were simple, like the ego in ourselves Monads were organized in such a way as to fall under a dominant monad, which was God Leibniz also held that everything that happened to a substance was necessary to it, but that God created the world of sub-stances according to the principle of *sufficient reason, which made this world the best of all possible worlds Despite the Spinozistic necessity that this seemed to entail
as far as human-beings are concerned, Leibniz thought, but did not convince others, that a form of freedom was still possible
One might think that the British Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, were, because of the empiricism, mainly epistemologically orientated This is superficially
true of Locke, whose Essay tries to set out the structure
and limits of human understanding, but he is concerned with substance, for example, although in a way that owes much to Boyle and contemporary physicists He also pre-sents a theory of *persons and *personal identity, which has provoked considerable recent interest, and, in his theory of abstract ideas, he sets out once again a concep-tualist theory of universals Berkeley was more nominalis-tically inclined, and attacked that theory because he thought that it let in a doctrine of material substance to which he was also opposed In place of the latter Berkeley put forward the view that ‘to be is to be perceived’, so that the only things that properly exist are ideas (the objects of perception, as he thought) and spirits (which include our-selves and particularly God) Berkeley’s theory is thus the first instance of full-blooded *idealism Of the three British Empiricists, Hume was the most anti-metaphysical, but his doctrine of impressions and ideas in a way continues Berkeley’s thinking, and Hume admits at one point that his impressions are in one sense what deserve the title of substances Ontologically, therefore, Hume regards real-ity as consisting merely of impressions and corresponding ideas, and he expresses a form of scepticism about both material bodies and self In both cases we have bundles of impressions and ideas which have a certain constancy and coherence, and it is these characteristics which make us believe, but do not justify such belief, in bodies and the self It has to be said, however, that Hume thought, with some reason, the resulting position over the self particu-larly worrying
metaphysics, history of 591
Trang 3It is Kant who stands at the culmination of this, being
opposed to what he regarded as the speculative
meta-physics handed down by the rationalists, but concerned,
as the Empiricists were, with the limits of the human
understanding in such a way as to allow more than they
had done Kant accepts a form of idealism, which he called
*‘transcendental’, saying that space and time were merely
forms of experience and had no application to what he
called *‘things-in-themselves’, the unknowable reality
which he thought must be assumed to underlie and in
some way be responsible for experience Kant’s idealism
was not, however, merely subjective, as Berkeley’s was, in
that he sees the *understanding as bringing to bear in
judgement certain principles, derived from the
*cat-egories or formal concepts which it supplies, in such a way
that the forms of objective judgement can be
distin-guished from merely subjective ones In particular, Kant
thought, objective experience can be seen to involve
causality and principles of necessary connection, despite
Hume’s scepticism on this All this, a sort of metaphysics
of experience, can be regarded as a substitute for
trad-itional metaphysics, which Kant thought of as concerned
with God, freedom, and immortality, but as involving an
attempt to use reason beyond the boundaries to which it
was properly limited Part of his Critique of Pure Reason
involves an attempt to show that such improper uses of
reason lead to contradictions and the like
Kant’s account of what is necessary about human
understanding and the limitations, by comparison, of
rea-son presented a kind of watershed for metaphysics, but
philosophers were soon to try to circumvent his
conclu-sions in a variety of ways Fichte objected to the whole
idea of things-in-themselves, arguing that the ego or self
actively posits a non-self opposed to it, so that in effect that
non-self exists only for the self, while constituting
some-thing necessary, an absolute His idealism is thus the first
instance of so-called absolute *idealism Schopenhauer,
on the other hand, thought he could produce good reason
for believing that there was only one thing-in-itself and
that this was to be identified with will Both philosophers,
however, accepted a form of idealism The most radical
development in that respect was the philosophy of Hegel,
who thought that reason could certainly do what Kant
thought impossible, leading to the idea of an identification
of self and object This form of absolute idealism was
worked out in terms of a system of developing categories,
culminating in what Hegel called the absolute notion in
which ‘Spirit knows itself as Spirit’ Hegel’s metaphysical
system is both monumental and encyclopaedic in
charac-ter, claiming to bring all phenomena within its terms of
reference It has been seen as either marvellous or
repul-sive by different commentators
There were, of course, reactions to it *Existentialists,
beginning with Kierkegaard, objected that existence
pre-cedes essence, and that Hegel’s thought left out
individu-ality This was an objection to the idea that reality could be
seen as such only in terms of an all-comprehensive system
Marx, using, at any rate initially, somewhat Hegelian
terms, tried to turn the system on its head by insisting on the materialist and social basis of all thought and thereby
of reality Hegelian thought had a late influence in Eng-land towards the end of the nineteenth century, particu-larly in F H Bradley, although he objected to the more systematic aspects of Hegel’s thought To his *monism (the belief that reality was one) there was in turn a reaction
in the *logical atomism of Russell and perhaps the early Wittgenstein, according to which reality involves a plurality of *sense-data, which, like Leibniz’s monads, constituted absolute simples Subsequently, the anti-metaphysical theory of the Logical Positivists, such as Ayer, who, on the basis of the principle that the meaning
of a statement is to be found in its method of verification, argued that metaphysical statements were nonsensical, put metaphysics out of fashion, where on many popular views it remains
In fact, however, it continues, and Strawson’s so-called
‘descriptive metaphysics’, according to which ontological distinctions between individuals or objects of identifica-tion are made relative to speaker–hearer discourse, is something of a return to Kant, though without the ideal-ism Elsewhere in Europe there has been, for example, Heidegger’s anti-scientific concern with the nature of
being and with Dasein or presence in the world This
pres-ence is of a kind that only human individuals have, and Heidegger saw it as having an intimate connection with time, on a view of time which sees it as having fundamen-tally to do with the ideas of past, present, and future, and not simply temporal relations between events These alternative conceptions of time have been a central issue
in Anglo-Saxon metaphysics too, ever since the Cam-bridge Hegelian McTaggart argued, early in the twentieth century, that time must, essentially, have to do with past, present, and future (or, as it is sometimes put, ‘tense’) and that, because every event is all three and thus in possession
of incompatible attributes, time is unreal To the objec-tion that events have all three attributes at different times, McTaggart argued that this only produced an infinite regress Different philosophers have drawn different morals from these claims, including the moral that time must fundamentally have nothing to do with ‘tense’ It is equally arguable that the correct conclusion is that the
‘tensed’ point of view is indispensable to an account of reality and that it is the attempt to do without it in charac-terizing reality that causes the trouble Heidegger has his own and different reasons for emphasizing a ‘tensed’ con-ception of time, in that he is concerned to bring out what presence in the world, in his sense, entails—in particular that it must have its end in death, when time ends for us
In other quarters again, particularly in the USA and Australia, an emphasis on science has produced its own scientistic metaphysics, according to which only sup-posedly scientific characterizations of reality will do Such views not only reject the kind of ‘tensed’ conceptions of time which I have noted above, but also underplay the kinds of point of view that are arguably involved in self-hood and thereby in any reality which involves selves
592 metaphysics, history of
Trang 4Such a metaphysics tends inevitably to be materialist,
though not necessarily in the kind of way in which
Marx-ian thought is materialist It is simply assumed that all that
exists in the end is particular incidences of matter in
motion and that what seems at first not to be that is in fact
identical with some form of it Nevertheless, although
Cartesian *dualism is widely rejected as a great mistake as
well as a great obstacle to the successful development of
philosophy, the pressures deriving from what led to that
dualism in the first place—the first-person point of view—
remain, and are emphasized by some philosophers, e.g
Thomas Nagel And so it goes on d.w.h
*descriptive metaphysics; materialism; modality and
metaphysics; opposition to metaphysics; revisionary
metaphysics
D W Hamlyn, Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1984).
—— The Penguin History of Western Philosophy (London, 1987).
A J P Kenny, Ancient Philosophy (Oxford, 2004), ch 6.
——Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2005), ch 6.
Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge,
1988)
T L S Sprigge, Theories of Existence (Harmondsworth, 1984).
Ralph C S Walker, Kant (London, 1978).
Margaret D Wilson, Descartes (London, 1978).
metaphysics, opposition to Opposition to metaphysics
has come from both within philosophy and outside it
*Logical Positivism, though now defunct, was
particu-larly hostile to what its adherents saw as the meaningless,
because unverifiable, claims of metaphysics These
objec-tions foundered on the impossibility of providing an
acceptable criterion of *verifiability But the deference to
empirical science displayed by the Logical Positivists is
still a feature of much Anglo-American analytic
philoso-phy, creating an intellectual climate inimical to the pursuit
of speculative metaphysics This hostility is paralleled in
the popular writings of many scientists, who seem to think
that any legitimate issues once embraced by metaphysics
now belong exclusively to the province of empirical
sci-ence—issues such as the nature of *space and *time, and
the mind–body problem Such writers are often blithely
unaware of the uncritical metaphysical assumptions
per-vading their works and the philosophical nạvety of many
of their arguments But it is ironic that the deference
shown by many philosophers to the latest scientific
theor-ies is not reciprocated by the popularizing scientists, who
do not conceal their contempt for philosophy in general as
well as metaphysics in particular
More recent hostility to metaphysics comes from the
post-modernists and deconstructionists, who wish to
pro-claim that philosophy—and certainly metaphysics—is
dead These writers represent metaphysics as a temporary
aberration of the Western intellect, denying the notion
that it is a pursuit of perennial questions for which timeless
answers may legitimately be sought Of course, these
crit-ics of metaphyscrit-ics, in repudiating any objective
concep-tion of truth in favour of a fashionable cultural relativism,
can make no common cause with the scientific critics,
whose quite contrary assumption is that science provides the royal road to objective truth and ultimately to a final
‘Theory of Everything’ With enemies so divided amongst themselves, metaphysics may comfort itself with the thought that so many people can’t be right The very fact
of such widespread disagreement over fundamentals demonstrates the need for critical and reflective meta-physical inquiry, pursued not dogmatically but in the spirit of Kant
Despite all this hostility, metaphysics and *ontology are currently enjoying a modest revival amongst professional philosophers, who are no longer embarrassed to discuss such issues as the nature of substance and to advance real-ist theories of *universals But much of this work is highly technical, involving sophisticated applications of *modal logic, and consequently it is difficult to convey its results
to a lay public There is thus a danger that such work will
be dismissed as a revival of scholasticism without rele-vance to everyday concerns That would be a pity, and so
it is not only the duty but also in the interest of metaphys-icians to make their work more accessible, with a view to countering the relativistic and scientistic dogmas of our time
Perhaps the most serious intellectual threat to meta-physics as traditionally conceived comes from the move-ment towards *naturalism in contemporary philosophy, taking its lead from W V Quine’s advocacy of ‘natural-ized epistemology’ With the theory of knowledge recon-ceived as, in effect, a branch of empirical psychology and the concomitant rejection of the traditional distinction between *a priori and a posteriori truth, the claim of meta-physics to have a distinctive subject-matter and method has been put under some pressure However, just as the cruder scientistic and relativistic enemies of metaphysics may be accused of promoting a particular metaphysical dogma under the guise of an onslaught on metaphysics in general, so too may this charge be levelled at its naturalis-tic crinaturalis-tics The normative categories of reason and truth transcend naturalistic reduction and cannot, without prag-matic incoherence, be argued out of existence e.j.l
H Kornblith (ed.), Naturalizing Epistemology (Cambridge, Mass.,
1985)
R Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford, 1980).
S Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
metaphysics, problems of In contemporary philosophy, problems of metaphysics often take the form of a trilemma concerning some large and important feature of our lives or discourse, a trilemma whose terms are: illu-sion, well-founded appearance, and fundamental reality
In recent decades these problems most often tend to arise against the backdrop of a broad *naturalism and, often, scientific *realism The problems themselves may be viewed as demands for possibility explanations: How are values and norms possible in a world of facts? How are minds and mental phenomena possible in a world of matter in motion? How is freedom of action or will pos-sible in a world of scientific law? How can there be abstract
metaphysics, problems of 593
Trang 5entities in a world of events and other contingent
particu-lars? In each case the same troublesome trilemma presents
itself
Concerning any of these realms or dimensions—e.g
values, the mental, freedom, and abstract—there is the
view that it is all a big illusion, that there is really nothing
in that realm or dimension Alternatively, it may be held
that there are real denizens of the realm in question, with
a reality as fundamental as that of any particle or field
pos-tulated by our physics And according to a third, irenic
view, though there are real enough entities or phenomena
in the target realm, none is fundamental, all deriving
rather from more basic entities or phenomena All indeed
are said to resemble ordinary bodies—tables, quantities of
water, cats and dogs, etc.—in being real enough, though
derived from the existence and organization of more basic
entities: from cells or molecules, etc
For example, it might be held that values and the
normative are a complete illusion Thus, for the
non-cognitivist, normative and evaluative concepts do not
represent any mind- or language-independent constituent
or aspect of reality Rather, their significance is only
func-tional: like that of the imperative mood or the exclamation
mark It is an illusion to suppose that the goodness of a
juicy, sweet apple attaches to it just as do its redness and its
roundness For others, however, the goodness of an apple
is just as objective a property of it as its roundness, or,
certainly, its redness: just as objective a property, and just
as real, and fundamental But there is a third, irenic, option,
according to which the goodness of the apple and the
rightness of biting into it are real and objective enough,
but ‘well founded’ on more fundamental properties:
e.g on the apple’s disposition to cause, or on the biting
into it actually causing, a sufficient balance of pleasure
over pain (especially when compared with the
alterna-tives open to the agent at the time) This third option
comes with two interesting suboptions: first, adding further
that the evaluative and normative phenomena in question
are not only well founded (bene fundata) but also actually
reducible by definition or analysis to the underlying
realities that give rise to them; and, alternatively,
remain-ing deliberately non-committal on that issue, claimremain-ing
only that the phenomena in question do supervene on
underlying realities, whether or not they are reducible to
them or definable or analysable in their terms
Similar issues arise with regard to the realm of *minds
and the mental Let us assume that reality is constituted of
particulars (whether substances or events) with the
prop-erties that characterize them and the relations that
inter-relate them Just what is included among these particulars,
properties, and relations has been a matter of considerable
controversy in the history of Western philosophy
Idealists view reality as ultimately spiritual or mental
For them the basic particulars are subjects of thought or
experience, souls or spirits or monads, the world of matter
in motion being nothing more than a stable appearance to
our minds If we say there are snowballs, for the idealist
we are right at best in the sense that in certain
circum-stances our minds are disposed systematically to experi-ence combinations of whiteness, roundness, and coldness
The foundation of the existence of such supposed objects
therefore lies in the contents of our minds For the idealist, physical bodies are rather like images in a rich and stable dream And we are essentially minds, subjects of thought and consciousness Leibniz and Berkeley were idealists Materialists and physicalists view material or physical objects or events as more fundamental than minds or egos
or their modes of thought or experience Accordingly, they would reduce mind to matter rather than matter to mind For the materialist there are no fundamental sub-jects of consciousness, no souls or spirits We have minds simply because we think, sense, feel, etc., and we do all this as rational animals with properly functioning brains and nervous systems Hobbes was a materialist, as have been most contemporary philosophers who write in the analytic tradition The token physicalism (and
*anomalous monism) of Donald Davidson is also a kind of physicalism of particulars, since it accepts events as basic particulars and regards these as without exception physical
Finally, dualists admit both souls and bodies as funda-mental entities Neither mind nor matter is reducible to the other and there is no problem of reducing either to the other For the dualist the problem lies rather in under-standing how mind and matter can possibly interact Descartes was a dualist
So far we have considered metaphysical options on the nature of basic particulars There are also similar options
on the nature of fundamental *properties or states of affairs Thus one can be a property phenomenalist, for whom the only fundamental states are mental, e.g sen-sory experiences, all other states being ‘reducible’ to or at least derivative from these
For a physicalist with regard to states or properties, on the other hand, only physical properties are fundamental; hence any state constituted by a particular having a prop-erty, or by a number of particulars related by a certain rela-tion, is a fundamental state only if the particulars are all physical and the properties and relations are all physical The type–type identity theory is an option open to such a physicalist, and believers in type–type identity might hold the identity to be necessary, as did logical behaviourists, and as do functionalists Alternatively, a believer in type–type identity might opt for ‘contingent identity’, as with the functional-specification view of David Lewis Finally, property dualists admit both physical proper-ties irreducible to the mental, and mental properproper-ties irre-ducible to the physical Recent debates over qualia, over the existence of irreducibly qualitative and experiential aspects of one’s experience, have divided mentalists on the affirmative (e.g Ned Block and Jerry Fodor with their
‘absent qualia’ argument, and Thomas Nagel with his appeal to subjectivity), from physicalists, especially func-tionalists, on the negative (such as David Armstrong and Daniel Dennett, with their attempt to reduce conscious-ness in general to propositional attitudes) Some (e.g
Syd-594 metaphysics, problems of
Trang 6ney Shoemaker) have tried to reconcile *functionalism
with acceptance of qualia, but for our purposes the
accep-tance of qualia is the important move, if such qualitative
aspects of experience are supposed a fundamental sort of
mental property not reducible to the physical, nor
super-venient upon it
With regard to *freedom of action or of the will, one
faces the same set of options One might hold freedom to
be a complete illusion, since we are natural beings caught
in the web of physical law from cradle to grave Or one
might alternatively hold that freedom is a basic fact of life:
one might rather deny that a human life could ever be
wholly caught within a web of natural laws A third, more
irenic, position is possible, moreover, according to which
we do enjoy freedom, but a freedom that is after all
com-patible with the sway of physical law over every detail of
human life There is important support for this
alter-native, quite apart from the implausibility of any
meta-physics that tries to set a priori limits to how much science
might achieve in understanding human behaviour For
consider the postulation of libertarian action not
pro-duced by antecedent conditions in accordance with
physical law This is what the libertarian believer in
funda-mental freedom accepts But it is puzzling how that can
help secure the kind of freedom desired: namely, the kind
that would support the attribution of responsibility to the
agent, and the assignment of praise or blame, reward or
punishment The reconcilist—or compatibilist—camp for
its part still owes a large and challenging debt: reconcilists
must still explain how such freedom can be reconciled
with the fact that, on the assumption of *determinism,
every physical detail of one’s life is already determined
prior to one’s birth They must introduce, in the teeth of
that impressive fact, some crucial distinction among one’s
actions, between those that are nevertheless not
‘com-pelled’ in some appropriate sense, and for which we can
remain responsible, and those that are thus compelled,
which relieves the agent of responsibility
Metaphysical world-views have derived from
episte-mological constraints Thus one might be impressed by
the difference between one’s own consciousness, to
which one enjoys introspective access, on one side, and,
on the other, the supposed world of physical fact beyond
Philosophers have long puzzled over how such a
funda-mental chasm could ever be bridged by reason How
could one ever know about the reality beyond on the basis
of what one knows immediately about one’s own
con-sciousness? One cannot deduce how it is beyond one’s
consciousness simply from how it is within it: illusions,
hallucinations, dreams, sceptical scenarios like that of the
*brain in a vat and the Cartesian evil demon, establish that
impossibility clearly enough (*Malin génie.) So it would
seem that at best one must argue one’s way to the external
world through some inductive form of reasoning But to
many this has seemed hopeless if the world beyond is
con-stituted by phenomena of a wholly different order and
inaccessible to our experience For how could one so
much as understand such ‘phenomena’? And, besides,
even if one could somehow understand them, how could one know about them? Presumably one would have to establish inductive correlations from which one could then generalize and on the basis of which one could argue from the character of one’s experience to what lies out-side Considerations such as these, deriving from the needs of epistemology, have led philosophers in the empiricist tradition to one or another form of idealist
*phenomenalism, to the view that reality is through and through constituted by experience, in the form of impressions and ideas (and, for some, subjects of such experience)
Rationalists for their part have equally reasoned from assumptions concerning knowledge and understanding to metaphysical conclusions of great scope For the rational-ist mind, reality must be comprehensible through and
through It must be possible for a mind powerful enough
and well enough stocked with information to attain a complete understanding of the universe Here the
follow-ing assumptions are in play: (a) the universe is the totality
of facts; (b) to understand a fact is to understand why it is a fact, why it obtains; (c) if a fact cannot be understood in its
own terms, if it is not self-explanatory, then in order to understand why it obtains one needs an explanation of it,
an explanation of why it obtains; (d) a complete under-standing of the universe would be an underunder-standing of all facts; (e) X is an explanation of the fact that p (of why it is the case that p) only if X is a set of true assumptions (facts) that jointly logically imply the fact that p via some
prin-ciple of lawful regularity
Fundamental *laws would be (by definition) unex-plained, there being no more fundamental laws to explain them But that would be an obstacle to complete
under-standing only if the laws in question would require
explan-ation in order to be understood Could any laws or facts
be (in a sense) self-explaining? Consider the fact (F ) that
nothing is diverse from itself What could possibly explain such a fact? It is not easy to think of anything else which might explain anything so fundamental Even if it turns out that in fact there is nothing external that can supply such explanation, would that show a lack in our
under-standing of F? Don’t we understand F as well as we ever
understand anything, even without need of external
explanation? If so, we have then in F a fundamental fact
that requires no (external) explanation in order to be
understood The two relevant features of F are evidently, first, its necessity, i.e the fact that things could not possibly have been otherwise than F says they are, and, second, the obviousness of that necessity, it being obvious that things could not possibly have been otherwise than F says they
are Any such fact will be perfectly well understood in its own terms and will need no further, external explanation Suppose the natural order to consist of material part-icles in various configurations, moving and reconfiguring
in accordance with physical law Even if we assume that the series never had a beginning in time, why is there such
a series when there might have been a different one or even a changeless void instead? In answer to this it would
metaphysics, problems of 595
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particu-lar contingencies within the series by appeal in each case
to other antecedent contingencies in that same series, and
expect to have answered thus the legitimate question why
there is such a series at all
Leibniz understands our predicament in roughly these
terms and takes it as his own Here is a very brief sketch of
his resolution: (a) the best possible world is necessarily
best; (b) *God, being necessarily omniscient, necessarily
sees it to be best; (c) God, being necessarily infinitely good,
necessarily wills that world to be; (d) since God is
neces-sarily omnipotent, that world necesneces-sarily comes to be, and
it is hence, of course, our world
If a world (or universe) is a totality of facts, then if a
world W differs from a world W′in any detail no matter
how small, then W and W′must be two different worlds
Hence if by Leibniz’s account our world necessarily
comes to be, then every detail in it, no matter how small,
necessarily comes to be Not one grain of sand could have
been different in its qualities or location But this
conclu-sion is not idiosyncratic to Leibniz’s particular proposal
for how it might be possible to attain a complete
under-standing of the universe For, as we have seen already,
however we fill in assumptions and laws in order to
explain fully the existence and character of the natural
order of events (e.g of matter in motion from eternity to
eternity), the resulting assumptions and laws had better be
necessary facts if we are not just to extend the problem to
another series of contingencies in the vertical direction
Suppose we lump all the assumptions into one big
assumption A and all the laws into one big law L If such
necessary A and L are to explain the existence and character
of the natural order (at least to an infinite being who could
grasp it all), then by our account of explanation, A and L
must jointly entail that the natural order does exist and has
exactly the character it does have But anything thus
entailed by what is necessary must itself be necessary It
follows that if we have such explanation, then the natural
order must necessarily exist and must necessarily have
exactly the character that it does have So, again, no grain
of sand could possibly have been different in its qualities or
location And this result is thus seen to derive not just from
anything special in Leibniz’s particular explanation, but
from the very nature of what a complete explanation
would have to be What is made plausible by our
reason-ing is that if a complete understandreason-ing of the universe is to
be attainable to anyone, even to a being with access to all
information and with no limit to his faculty of reason, then
the universe must be necessary in every detail (As an
alternative to Leibniz’s, compare Spinoza’s very different
but equally rationalistic and equally necessitarian
world-view.)
Once again we see how an epistemic commitment
drives powerful thinkers to a metaphysical view about
broad and fundamental features of reality One can, of
course, deny the commitment, denying that there is
any-thing deeper than the natural order of contingent events
Unless there is some mistake in our reasoning, however,
this would commit one to the view that there is inevitable opacity to reason, inevitable absurdity built into the universe, something that even an omniscient being with infinite reason could not wholly eliminate And this con-sequence contributes to a powerful intellectual move-ment alternative to both the broad empiricism and the broad rationalism already sketched, a movement that
cul-minates in works such as the Nausea of Jean-Paul Sartre,
obsessed with the contingency of the world, and deriving its existentialist consequences about human life and society
In the twentieth century linguistic philosophy rejected traditional metaphysics as a pseudo-inquiry whose real point is or should be linguistic This has taken the form of
a linguistic *relativism (LR) according to which: When we say ‘There are three objects here, not eight’ we are really saying ‘The following is assertible as true in our language
L: “There are three objects here, not eight”.’ This is, for example, in the spirit of Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Lan-guage, where Carnap defends the following theses: (i)
Phil-osophy, when cognitive at all, amounts to the logical syntax of scientific language (ii) But there can be alterna-tive such languages and we are to choose between them
on grounds of convenience (iii) A language is completely characterized by its formation and transformation rules
In that same book Carnap also distinguishes between: (s1) object sentences: e.g ‘Five is a prime number’, ‘Babylon was
a big town’;
(s2) pseudo-object sentences: e.g ‘Five is not a thing but a num-ber’, ‘Babylon was treated in yesterday’s lecture’;
(s3) syntactical sentences: e.g ‘ “Five” is not a thing-word but a number-word’, ‘ “Babylon” occurred in yesterday’s lecture’ And he defends the thesis that although s2 sentences seem deceptively like s1 sentences, actually they are really s3 sentences in ‘material mode’ disguise Quine agrees that a kind of ‘semantic ascent’ is possible, as when we shift from talk of miles to talk of ‘mile’, but he thinks this kind of
semantic ascent is always trivially available, not just in
phil-osophy but in science generally and even beyond Thus
we can paraphrase ‘There are wombats in Tasmania’ as
‘ “Wombat” is true of some creatures in Tasmania’ Quine does grant that semantic ascent tends to be especially
use-ful in philosophy But he explains why as follows (Word and Object, 272):
The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words) and on the main terms concerning them Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes, and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best
No wonder it helps in philosophy
However, the use of that strategy is clearly limited to dis-course about recondite entities of controversial status No relevant gain is to be expected from semantic ascent when the subject-matter is the inventory of the market-place itself Tables and chairs, headaches and beliefs, and even good apples are no more controversial than words: in fact,
596 metaphysics, problems of
Trang 8some at least of these seem less so, by a good margin No
general conceptual or linguistic relativity, no avoidance of
metaphysical discourse, can be plausibly supported by the
semantic-ascent strategy offered by Quine In addition,
questions of coherence arise concerning LR When we say
something of the form ‘The following is assertible in our
language L: ’ can we rest with a literal interpretation
that does not require ascent and relativization? If not,
where does ascent stop? Are we then really saying ‘The
fol-lowing is assertible in our language L: “The folfol-lowing is
assertible in our language L: ” ’ This way lies vicious
regress But if we can stop the regress with metalinguistic
reference to our sentences of L (and to ourselves), why can
we not stop it with our references to headaches and good
apples, and to tables and chairs and other medium-sized
dry goods? Other ways of attacking the problems of
meta-physics as mere pseudo-problems have also gained
prom-inence and a wide following in recent decades, but this
linguistic turn will have to serve as our example, and, as
revealed with this example, metaphysics is neither
destroyed nor even silenced by such attacks
This article has focused on the following general facts
about metaphysical problems: (a) that many take the form
of a trilemma among illusion, well-founded appearance,
and fundamental reality, and arise in recent decades
against a backdrop of naturalism; (b) that interrelated
solutions to them—i.e broad metaphysical positions—
sometimes derive from epistemological assumptions
con-cerning what is comprehensible or knowable, and the
ways in which this might be so; and (c) that in
contempor-ary philosophy metaphysical problems have been
deni-grated by positivist and linguistic philosophers as
pseudo-problems or as linguistic issues with a mask of
pro-fundity I have discussed particular metaphysical
prob-lems mainly as examples, and there are many that I have
not so much as mentioned: problems, for example, about
*space and *time, about *substance and attribute, about
*events and states, about *universals and particulars, and
about *change and *identity through time Discussion of
these and other metaphysical problems may be found in
this Companion under specific headings e.s
*causation; descriptive metaphysics; idealism;
materi-alism; opposition to metaphysics; pseudo-philosophy;
revisionary metaphysics
R M Chisholm, On Metaphysics (Minneapolis, 1989).
M Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge, Mass.,
1991)
T Honderich, A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience,
and Life-Hopes (Oxford, 1988).
J Kim, Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge, 1993).
S Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
T Kuhn,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn (1st edn.
1962) (Chicago, 1970)
D Lewis, Philosophical Papers, i and ii (Oxford, 1983).
T Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986).
R Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.,
1981)
H Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, 1981).
W V Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
N Rescher, A System of Pragmatic Idealism, i–iii (Princeton, NJ,
1992–3)
metaphysics, revisionary: see revisionary metaphysics metempsychosis:see reincarnation.
method, joint J S Mill proposed to unify two of his five canons of experimental inquiry, the *method of agree-ment and the *method of difference, in a third, the ‘joint method’: namely, ‘If two or more instances in which the phenomenon occurs have only one circumstance in com-mon, while two or more instances in which it does not occur have nothing in common save the absence of that circumstance, the circumstance in which alone the two instances differ is the effect or the cause or an indispens-able part of the cause of the phenomenon’ However, this canon allows the possibility that a type of phenomenon under investigation may have more than one type of cause
or that it may have a single underlying cause that is not revealed Nor does Mill’s method show how the strength
of a causal hypothesis may be only a matter of degree, though he accepts this elsewhere l.j.c
*method of concomitant variations; method of residues
method, scientific:see scientific method.
methodic doubt: see doubt.
method in philosophy: see philosophical inquiry: first
premisses and principles
method of agreement J S Mill’s A System of Logic (1843)
proposed the ‘method of agreement’ as the first of five canons of experimental inquiry It determines that ‘If two
or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circum-stance in which alone all the incircum-stances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon’ For example, if an alkaline substance is combined with an oil in several otherwise different varieties of circumstance, and in each case a soap results, then the combination of an oil and an alkali causes the production of a soap It is thus not an observed regularity of co-occurrence that evidences the cau-sation but an observed elimination of all but one hypothesis However, to secure this elimination we need to test, and may not in fact know, all the eligible hypotheses l.j.c
*method, joint; method of concomitant variations; method of difference; method of residues
method of concomitant variations The fifth of J S
Mill’s five canons of experimental inquiry (A System of Logic (1843) ) Phenomena which vary concomitantly can
be assumed to be causally related, whether one causes the other, or they are effects of a common cause The method
is useful, Mill thinks, for cases where the methods of
method of concomitant variations 597
Trang 9agreement and difference cannot be applied because we
are facing phenomena which can be neither excluded (to
see what happens in their absence) nor isolated (to exclude
irrelevant factors); but it has limitations, he adds, because
we often cannot tell whether all of one phenomenon
relates causally to the other, and it cannot tell us what
happens outside the limits of the observed variations Like
the other canons it assumes that there are causes to be
found within the sphere of our present knowledge
a.r.l
J S Mill, A System of Logic, bk 3, ch 8 (London, 1843).
method of difference J S Mill proposed the ‘method of
difference’ as the second of five canons of experimental
inquiry It determines that ‘If an instance in which the
phe-nomenon under investigation occurs, and an instance in
which it does not occur, have every circumstance in
com-mon save one, that one occurring only in the former; the
circumstance in which alone the two instances differ is the
effect, or the cause, or an indispensable part of the cause of
the phenomenon’ For example, when a man is shot
through the heart, it is by this method we know that it was
the gunshot which killed him: for he was in the fullness of
life immediately before, all circumstances being the same
except the wound But in some cases it may be difficult to
establish that two instances have every circumstance in
*method, joint; method of agreement; method of
con-comitant variations; method of residues
method of residues J S Mill’s fourth canon of
experi-mental inquiry was entitled the ‘method of residues’:
namely, ‘Subduct from any phenomenon such part as is
known to be the effect of certain antecedents, and the
residue of the phenomenon is the effect of the remaining
antecedents’ For example, said Mill, if the movements of
a comet cannot be wholly accounted for by its gravitation
towards the sun and the planets, the residual feature must
be explained by the resistance of the medium through
which it moves But Mill recognized that in practice we
may not be able to be certain that one particular factor is
the only antecedent to which the residual phenomenon
may be referred So any induction by the method of
residues needs to be confirmed by obtaining the residual
phenomenon artificially and trying it separately, or by
deriving its operation from otherwise known laws
l.j.c
*method, joint; method of agreement; method of
con-comitant variations; method of difference
methodological holism and individualism There are
two large debates in *social philosophy or social ontology,
both with methodological ramifications for the
*philoso-phy of social science (Pettit, The Common Mind) One is
concerned with how far human beings (non-causally)
depend on their social relationships for the possession of
the ability to think, or for the possession of some such
characteristic human capacity The atomist denies any such dependence while the non-atomist asserts that it obtains The other debate is concerned with whether the existence of aggregate social entities—in particular, the obtaining of aggregate-level regularities—means that human beings do not conform in full to our commonplace psychological image of them as more or less autonomous, more or less rational creatures The individualist denies that aggregate entities entail any compromise of such commonplace psychology while the non-individualist maintains that there is some more or less significant com-promise involved
There are also many other methodologically relevant debates that are loosely associated with these divisions Some examples are the debates over whether aggregate-level social theory is reducible to psychological theory; whether individual-level explanation is preferable to aggregate-level explanation in social science; whether social scientific discovery is likely to force any revisions on our commonplace psychology; whether individual sub-jects are reciprocally influenced by the aggregate entities they constitute, as they form the concepts of such entities; whether individual agents are so constrained by the cir-cumstances of their social setting that we need only attend
to those circumstances—we can ignore psychological matters of belief and desire—in predicting what they will do; and whether historically significant individual actions are generally dispensable, in the sense that had the indi-viduals involved not done what they did, there would have been others to take their place
The term ‘methodological individualism’ is usually employed with a variety of connotations across the range
of positions identified here The self-described meth-odological individualist will certainly be an individualist in the sense defined above; he will probably be an atomist; and he will tend to go for the position that is thought most flattering to the status of the individual in each of the other debates The term ‘methodological holism’ is less com-monly employed and its connotations will vary in the
Philip Pettit, The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society and Politics (New York, 1993).
methodology. The philosophical study of *scientific method The central question arising from this study is how to interpret methodological statements There are three alternatives: description, convention, prescription Under the first option, methodological statements are either interpreted as descriptions of scientific practice, or methodology is seen as a ‘science of science’ which estab-lishes correlations between practice and results Just as sci-ence has methods which allow the successful study of electrons, so too philosophers could apply the scientific methods of, say, *cognitive science or *biology to the study of science itself Objectors to such an approach point
to the lack of a non-contentious stock of results and methods in the human sciences Therefore, the human sciences would not be able to provide a consensus on what
598 method of concomitant variations
Trang 10the methods of science in fact are An obvious reply would
be to advocate the application of the methods of physical
science itself Of course, if we do not know what these
methods are, we cannot apply them Thus it seems
descriptivism is either question-begging or viciously
cir-cular A common reply to be found in the writings of the
*Vienna Circle and Quine is that a virtuous spiral is a
better geometrical analogue than a vicious circle Under
this account, the application of a method to questions of
method provides a sharpening of both the method and
the questions asked
If, as Popper has argued, scientific method constitutes
the rules which govern scientific behaviour, these rules
may be as conventional as the rules which govern the
game of chess A problem arises if two mutually
contra-dictory rule books are proposed: Which game of science
should be chosen? The obvious answer is to decide which
set of rules is more ‘useful’ or ‘suitable’ This assumes, of
course, that we have non-conventional criteria of
‘useful-ness’ and ‘suitability’ We could appeal to the intuitions of
practitioners about their activity There are two possible
sources of these intuitions In the first case they result
from the practitioner’s previous experiences of similar
activities, and their association—or lack of association—
with some desired outcome This answer seems to require
knowledge about what methods are correlated with what
outcomes, which is the central problem of descriptivism
In the second case there is a correct answer to the question
what sort of rationality motivates the rules of science This
leads us to our third position
According to normativists, methodological
impera-tives are true or false much as ethical norms are under an
objectivist account In its pure form, this view is not
widely held, with the exception of decision theorists like
Keynes and the later Carnap A problem arises if we ask
whether a transgression of such norms could make an
observable difference to the life of the transgressor On the
one hand, if it makes no difference, one might question the
subject-matter: are judgements of rationality really so
much hot air? On the other hand, if transgression does
make a difference, the desirability of following the norms
of rationality would depend on the factual differences in
outcomes that result Thus this position is also in danger
t.chi
r.f.h
*Mill’s methods; science, problems of the philosophy
of
Rudolf Carnap, ‘Inductive Logic and Rational Decisions’, in
R Carnap and R Jeffrey, Studies in Inductive Logic and
Probabil-ity (Berkeley, Calif., 1971).
K R Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, 1980), ch 2.
W V Quine, The Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), ch 1,
sect 8
Meyerson, Émile (1859–1933) Born in Lublin, became a
naturalized Frenchman, and worked for Jewish agencies
after a brief spell as an industrial chemist Meyerson wrote
on philosophy of science and general epistemology, his main interest being the nature of thought as exemplified in its successful products
An anti-positivist, he argued, for example in Identity and Reality (1908), that scientific knowledge attempts to reach
beyond mere descriptive and predictive laws to an under-standing of the nature of the reality beyond appearances The human mind seeks the permanent behind phenom-enal change, the identity within diversity as exemplified in conservation laws, such as the law of inertia and the law of conservation of energy And yet this identity which our reason apprehends (or perhaps constructs) cannot embrace the totality of reality, for there is also change
a.j.l
*positivism; thinking
Émile Meyerson, Identity and Reality, tr Kate Loewenberg
(London, 1930)
microcosm:see macrocosm and microcosm.
Mill, James (1773–1836) Scottish thinker who, after being educated at Edinburgh University, came to London and worked for a considerable time as assistant and publicist for Bentham Most famous for the strenuously intellectual education to which he subjected his more famous son, John Stuart Mill, he wrote influential pamphlets on educa-tion and government from a utilitarian point of view, as
well as a thoroughgoing associationist psychology, The Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind of 1829 (which
was later republished with extensive notes by his son) His most discussed philosophical work is the short pamphlet
On Government, which is a rigorous a priori argument for
majoritarian *democracy: since everyone acts in their own interest, only the greatest number can be relied on to protect the greatest happiness of the greatest number
r.h
*utilitarianism
Jack Lively and John Rees, Utilitarian Logic and Politics (Oxford,
1978)
Mill, John Stuart (1806–73), son of James Mill He was the greatest British philosopher of the nineteenth century, bringing Britain’s traditions of *empiricism and *liberal-ism to their Victorian apogee
The System of Logic, a product of his thirties, published
in 1843, made his reputation as a philosopher The Princ-iples of Political Economy, of 1848, was a synthesis of classical
economics which defined liberal orthodoxy for at least a quarter of a century His two best-known works of moral
philosophy, On Liberty and Utilitarianism, appeared later—
in 1859 and 1861 In the 1860s he was briefly a Member of Parliament, and throughout his life was involved in many radical causes Among them was his enduring support for
women’s rights—see The Subjection of Women of 1869.
The leading element in Mill’s thought is his lifelong effort to weave together the insights of enlightenment and romanticism He subscribed unwaveringly to what he
Mill, John Stuart 599