Entities A particular source of opposition to Carnap's semantic methods arises from the use of abstract entities such as classes, properties, and numbers, many philosphers feeling that such use depends upon demonstration that these abstract entities "do actually exist". Carnap regarded such questions as metaphysical and hence senseless, but they were raised by anti-metaphysical empiricists. Car...

Thomas Long has argued that there is an irreconcilable metaphysical difference between the views of those who, like ourselves, believe that on quality-of-life grounds it is sometimes justifiable to end the life of a severely handicapped infant, and those who, like Paul Ramsey, reject this view. Because of this metaphysical difference, Long considers it impossible for our arguments to refute Ram...

Salvaging analyticity, I argued, depends crucially on distinguishing between a metaphysical and an epistemic version of that concept. According to the metaphysical notion, a sentence is analytic if it owes its truth entirely to its meaning and without any contribution from the ‘facts.’ By contrast, I took a sentence to be epistemically analytic if grasp of its meaning can suffice for justified ...

In this paper I will argue in favor of the view that if physics is to become a coherent metaphysics of nature, it needs an interpretation, namely (i) a clear formulation of its ontological/metaphysical claims and (ii) and a precise understanding of how such claims are related to the world of our experience, which is the most important reservoir of traditional, merely aprioristic metaphysical sp...

Formal mereology should be of interest to metaphysicians because it allows us, in a rigorous way, to determine the consequence relations between metaphysical theses and theories, many of which are of metaphysical interest. Take, for example, the many and various puzzles of constitution, and the metaphysical theories that have been advanced to solve them. Ideally, it should be possible to analys...

A natural metametaphysical hope is that logic should be able to act as a neutral arbiter of metaphysical disputes, at least as a framework on which all parties can agree for eliciting the consequences of the rival metaphysical theories. An obvious problem for this hope is the proliferation of alternative logics, many of them motivated by metaphysical considerations. For example, rejection of th...

It has recently been suggested that a distinctive metaphysical relation — ‘Grounding’—is ultimately at issue in contexts in which some goings-on are said to hold ‘in virtue of’’, be (constitutively) ‘metaphysically dependent on’, or be ‘nothing over and above’ some others. Grounding is supposed to do good work (better than merely modal notions, in particular) in illuminating metaphysical depend...

Although biomedicine is responsible for the "miracles" of modern medicine, paradoxically it has also led to a quality-of-care crisis in which many patients feel disenfranchised from the health-care industry. To address this crisis, several medical commentators make an appeal for humanizing biomedicine, which has led to shifts in the philosophical boundaries of medical knowledge and practice. In...

In a recent article, Sam Page distinguishes four kinds of mind-(in)dependence: ontological, causal, structural, and individuative. He argues that, despite the fact that the metaphysical realism/antirealism debate has been frequently characterized as a debate between those who accept and those who deny that the world is causally and/or structurally dependent on minds, many antirealists are prima...

The total longitudinal form view of human beings is a metaphysical view which aims to locate our moral judgements about human embryos in a broader set of attitudes and characterisations. On this basis it has explanatory power and a real function in that it grounds our ethical discussion of embryos in other discourses. Contra Leavitt, this grounding suggests a broader criterion of relevance for ...