Metametaphysics New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology

by Chalmers, David; Manley, David; Wasserman, Ryan

• ISBN13: 9780199546008
• ISBN10: 0199546002
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-25
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Metaphysics asks questions about existence: for example, do numbers really exist? Metametaphysics asks questions about metaphysics: for example, do its questions have determinate answers? If so, are these answers deep and important, or are they merely a matter of how we use words? What is the proper methodology for their resolution? These questions have received a heightened degree of attention lately with new varieties of ontological deflationism and pluralism challenging the kind of realism that has become orthodoxy in contemporary analytic metaphysics. This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline. It brings together many of the central figures in the debate with their most recent work on the semantics, epistemology, and methodology of metaphysics.

Author Biography

David Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He works in the philosophy of mind and in related areas of philosophy and cognitive science. He is especially interested in consciousness, but is also interested in artificial intelligence and computation, in philosophical issues about meaning and possibility, and in the foundations of cognitive science and of physics.
David Manley is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. His papers in metaphysics and epistemology have appeared in such journals as Mind, The Journal of Philosophy, Nous, and The Philosophical Quarterly. Ryan Wasserman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington University.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	p. ix
Introduction: A Guided Tour of Metametaphysics	p. 1
Composition, Colocation, and Metaontology	p. 38
Ontological Anti-Realism	p. 77
Carnap and Ontological Pluralism	p. 130
The Question of Ontology	p. 157
The Metaontology of Abstraction	p. 178
Superficialism in Ontology	p. 213
Ontology and Alternative Languages	p. 231
Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics	p. 260
Ways of Being	p. 290
Metaphysics after Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks?	p. 320
On What Grounds What	p. 347
Ontological Realism	p. 384
Ontology, Analyticity, and Meaning: the Quine-Carnap Dispute	p. 424
Answerable and Unanswerable Questions	p. 444
Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment	p. 472
Must Existence-Questions have Answers?	p. 507
Index	p. 527
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