Freedom and moral responsibility have one foot in the practical realm of human affairs and the other in the esoteric realm of fundamental metaphysics—or so we believe. This has been denied, especially in the metaphysics-bashing era occupying the first two-thirds or so of the twentieth century, traces of which linger in the present day. But the reasons for this denial seem to us quite implausibl...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of logic from a metaphysical point of view – what is logic grounded in and what is its relationship with metaphysics. There are three general lines that we can take. 1) Logic and metaphysics are not continuous, neither discipline has no bearing on the other one. This seems to be a rather popular approach, at least implicitly, as philosophers of...

In this paper I will argue that if physics is to become a coherent metaphysics of nature it needs an “interpretation”. As I understand it, an interpretation of a physical theory amounts to offering (1) a precise formulation of its ontological claims and (2) a clear account of how such claims are related to the world of our experience. Notably, metaphysics enters importantly in both tasks: in (1...

This paper argues that there is value in a systematic philosophical approach to relations and surveys some of the major issues in the philosophy of relations. Rather than siding with relational ontology over substantivist ontology, however, the paper argues that the best philosophical approaches are causal theories of relation in which both relations and entities take their rise from an ontolog...

The present paper discusses different approaches to metaphysics and defends a specific, non-deflationary approach that nevertheless qualifies as scientifically-grounded and, consequently, as acceptable from the naturalistic viewpoint. By critically assessing some recent work on science and metaphysics, we argue that such a sophisticated form of naturalism, which preserves the autonomy of metaph...

We divide analytic metaphysics into naturalistic and non-naturalistic metaphysics. The latter we define as any philosophical theory that makes some ontological claim (as opposed to conceptual claim), where that ontological claim has no observable consequences. We discuss further features of non-naturalistic metaphysics, including its methodology of appealing to intuition, and we explain the way...

putnam has called for a renewal of philosophy by invoking the names of Wittgenstein and Dewey, both strong critics of traditional metaphysics. in the light of his own attacks on various forms of metaphysics (e.g. metaphysical realism, the fact/ value distinction), one question that arises is this: what is the fate of metaphysics in putnam’s vision of philosophy? The present paper explores this ...

This paper argues for a metaphysics of relations based on a characterization of quantum entanglement in terms of non-separability, thereby regarding entanglement as a sort of holism. By contrast to a radical metaphysics of relations, the position set out in this paper recognizes things that stand in the relations, but claims that, as far as the relations are concerned, there is no need for thes...

In this paper, we develop a formalization of a metaphysics of structures and provide new applications to geometry and to metaphysics. We adopt the theory of set-theoretical structures formulated in da Costa and French [15] and in da Costa and Rodrigues [16]. The applications are made in the context of extending the proposal advanced in Caulton and Butterfield [11] to a higher-order metaphysics.