Metaphysical explanations, unlike many other kinds of explanation, are standardly thought to be insensitive our epistemic situation and so not evaluable by cognitive values such as salience. I consider a case study that challenges this view. Some properties distributed over an extension. For example, the property being polka-dotted red on white, when instantiated, is surface. Similar have been ...

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that metaphysics is a necessary discipline – necessary in the sense that all areas of philosophy, all areas of science, and in fact any type of rational activity at all would be impossible without a metaphysical background or metaphysical presuppositions. Because of the extremely strong nature of this claim, it is not possible to put forward a very s...

According to logical positivism, so the story goes, metaphysical questions are meaningless, since they do not admit of empirical confirmation or refutation. However, the logical positivists did not in fact reject as meaningless all questions about for example, the structure of space and time. Rather, key figures such as Reichenbach and Schlick believed that scientific theories often presupposed...