The paper inquiries into Brandom’s conception of pragmatistic metaphysics, as outlined at the end of Between Saying and Doing. In the reconstruction proposed, the combination of pragmatism and analytical philosophy that is at the basis of Brandom’s program seems to have many aspects in common with the critical and dialectical conception of metaphysics that we find in Kant and Hegel. My paper is...

Aristotle talks about “the first philosophy” throughout Metaphysics – and it is metaphysics that Aristotle considers to be the first philosophy – but he never makes it entirely clear what first philosophy consists of. What he does make clear is that the first philosophy is not to be understood as a collection of topics that should be studied in advance of any other topics. In fact, Aristotle se...

I. In this paper I want to sketch an account of the role of skepticism in Kant's critical philosophy.1 The critical philosophy set forth in the Critique of Pure Reason (henceforth: the Critique) grew from and responds to a complex set of philosophical concerns. Among these two of special importance are concerns to address skepticism and to develop a reformed metaphysics. This much is widely rec...

Last chapter we discussed the first two phases in Heidegger’s relationship with Hegel, the earlier critical rejection of Hegel in Being and Time and dialogical confrontation with Hegel on the problem of finitude, infinitude, and the ontological difference in the PhG. In this chapter, I turn to the third and final phase in Heidegger’s confrontation with Hegel: the “enveloping” appropriation whic...

The question about the metaphysics of management is considered especially from the point of view of the subject, acts and object of management. Management is understood holistically, in connection to production, rather than as an independent domain in itself. In terms of metaphysics, the time-honoured question about the superiority of thing (substance, matter) ontology or process ontology is ad...

The general failure to individuate component causes in cognitive performance suggests the need for an alternative metaphysics. The metaphysics of control hierarchy theory accommodates the fact of self-organization in nature and the possibility that intentional actions are self-organized. One key assumption is that interactions among processes dominate their intrinsic dynamics. Scaling relations...

is true. Charge: It offends common sense to say that Caesar’s birth was a cause of his death. Response: e assertibility conditions of causal claims are affected by conversational context. Even if () is true, in normal contexts it will be uninformative, or misleading, or not a suitable answer to the sorts of questions we are interested in. And general pragmatic principles explain why it would ...

Not even false” is a saying that is part of the lore of academic physics. Metaphysics is said to be meaningless. But there are compelling arguments, that originate from the work of the rationalist philosopher Spinoza, and from the work of Godel, Church and Turing in the foundations of computer science, which relate physics to metaphysics. The principle of possibility from Spinoza and the unders...

Abstract This introduction consists of two parts. In the first part, special issue editors introduce inductive metaphysics from a historical as well systematic point view and discuss what distinguishes it other modern approaches to metaphysics. second they give brief summary individual articles in this issue.

1. Introduction Analytic metaphysics is in resurgence; there is renewed and vigorous interest in topics such as time, causation, persistence, parthood and possible worlds. We who share this interest often pay lip-service to the idea that metaphysics should be informed by modern science; some take this duty very seriously.