It is a commonplace in recent metaphysics that one’s logical commitments go hand in hand with one’s metaphysics. Brouwer, Heyting and Dummett have each championed the move to constructive (intuitionistic) reasoning on the grounds of anti-realism. I hope to break this close connection, to explain why a realist ought to reason constructively.

METAPHYSICS Peter Godfrey-Smith is professor of philosophy at Harvard University. He works primarily in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. He also has a more general interest in the philosophy of science, and makes excursions into metaphysics and epistemology. He has published two books so far: Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (1996) and Theory and Reality (2003)...

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...

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.