Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology

Description

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. Contents List of Contributors 1. Introduction: A Guided Tour of Metametaphysics 2. Composition, Colocation, and Metaontology 3. Ontological Anti-Realism 4. Carnap and Ontological Pluralism 5. The Question of Ontology 6. The Metaontology of Abstraction 7. Superficialism in Ontology 8. Ontology and Alternative Languages 9. Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics 10. Ways of Being 11. Metaphysics after Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks? 12. On What Grounds What 13. Ontological Realism 14. Ontology, Analyticity, and Meaning: the Quine–Carnap Dispute 15. Answerable and Unanswerable Questions 16. Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment 17. Must Existence-Questions have Answers? Index A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Пустая страница