The paper examines the fortunes of Aristotelian metaphysics in science and the philosophy of science. It considers the Enlightenment claim that such a metaphysics is fundamentally unscientific, and that its abandonment was essential to the scientific revolution. The history of the scientific revolution and the metaphysical debates involved in it is examined, and it is argued that the eclipse of...

In a famous and much misunderstood passage in Democracy and Education, Dewey (1916/1980) proclaims: ”If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education (338; emphasis in original). My article examines some of what he means by this s...

Kripke and Putnam have convinced most philosophers that we cannot do metaphysics of nature by analysing the senses of natural kind terms – simply because natural kind terms do not have senses. Neo-descriptivists, especially Frank Jackson and David Chalmers, believe that this view is mistaken. Merging classical descriptivism with a Kaplan-inspired two-dimensional framework, neo-descriptivists de...