Metametaphysics New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology

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

• ISBN13: 9780199546046
• ISBN10: 0199546045
• Format: Hardcover
• 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

Introduction: A Guided Tour of Metametaphysics

Composition, Colocation, and Metaontology

Ontological Anti-Realism

Carnap and Ontological Pluralism

The Question of Ontology

The Metaontology of Abstraction

Superficialism in Ontology

Ontology and Alternative Languages

Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics

Ways of Being

Metaphysics after Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks?

On What Grounds What

Ontological Realism

Ontology, Analyticity, and Meaning: The Quine-Carnap Dispute

Answerable and Unanswerable Questions

Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment

Must Existence-Questions Have Answers?

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