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This chapter seeks to considers the structure of the Critique from the viewpoint of metaphysics. The idea is that the Critique is a work on metaphysics when metaphysics is conceived the way it is done in Kant's lecture notes on metaphysics. The chapter seeks to illuminate two things: first, to help us to understand the science of metaphysics as Kant conceived it and to see what are the metaphysical questions which are possibly answerable; second, to help us to understand the structure as well as the content of the Critique by looking at it as a work that is mainly designated to solve the problems Kant took to be metaphysical. The aim is also to show with the help of an example that perhaps there is in contemporary analytic metaphysics room for a Kantian perspective.

This chapter outlines the naturalism motivating this volume, defends it from common criticisms, summarizes several recent books by contributors that serve as background for the debates in the volume, and shows the relevance of the theses in the different chapters to the project of naturalizing metaphysics. The roots of these debates are traced back to the logical positivists. Defenses of the empirical status of analytic metaphysics-based Quinean holism are criticized and interesting open questions about naturalized metaphysics are discussed.

An exercise in metaphilosophy, this chapter addresses one aspect of the relationship between science and philosophy. Non-naturalized, analytic metaphysics has not yielded results at all comparable with those achieved by mathematics and logic. Metaphysics needs to be naturalized, but how can scientific findings be made relevant to metaphysics—as evidence, as sources of new problems, or in other ways? Must some traditional metaphysical problems be abandoned as intractable? What sort of problems might take their place? Answers to these questions arise from detailed criticism of the answers given in Ladyman, Ross, et al., Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Naturalized metaphysics requires outstanding questions that we want answered but that don’t fall within the province of the sciences; there look to be such questions, including that of how to unify science; but whether we can answer them is best determined by trying to do so.

This chapter provides six arguments in favor of scientifically based ontology and against speculative ontology, a branch of analytic metaphysics. Parts of contemporary speculative ontology are untenable because they are factually false; intuitions are not domain-invariant; conceptual analysis is too closely tied to everyday experience; what counts as an acceptable philosophical idealization is left unarticulated; the world is not scale-invariant; and anthropocentric epistemology does not always minimize epistemic risk. Nevertheless, specifically philosophical arguments are necessary when making ontological claims and complete deference to scientific consensus is unreasonable. The overall strategy is to recognize that different domains of reality require different methods of discovery and justification, and that a significant part of contemporary metaphysics is employing methods that are inappropriate to its goals.

The introduction describes how the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena is at the heart of Gabriel Marcel’s reflective method. It then briefly contrasts Marcel’s reflective method with a few representatives of analytic metaphysics and continental metaphysics. Afterwards, it describes how Marcel’s reflective method is a phenomenological metaphysics. It ends by outlining the remaining chapters of Doing Philosophy Personally.

This chapter examines whether there are other essential truths about instantiation that can be extracted by analysis. It wants to know, that is, whether this most primitive of primitives can be subjected to analytic investigation. This is therefore a study in analytic metaphysics of the most blatant and unrepentant kind: What is the metaphysics of instantiation as revealed by a priori investigation of its conceptually revealed essence? It seeks to exemplify the general methodology advocated in this book in this particular case. The aim is to discover the nature of this aspect of the real by analyzing our concepts of it—thus engaging in the very kind of philosophy defended earlier.

This chapter discusses the nature of the pragmatist critique of metaphysics, of which Davidson has been an important source of inspiration. It begins by expanding on the claim that Davidson is easily absorbed by metaphysics, followed by pragmatist reservations toward metaphysics and toward the metaphysical Davidson. It is asked here whether it is not possible to recover a pragmatizing reading even of Davidson. Finally, the force and point of the pragmatist stance against metaphysics is explored. Even if metaphysics remains elusive, there remains the hope that some light will have been shed on the resources that Davidson offers pragmatists who are trying to affect the philosophical conversation, and also on what the metaphilosophical divergences are between a naturalistic pragmatism and contemporary analytic metaphysics.

This chapter outlines a consciousness-based approach to metaphysics: analytic phenomenology. Chapter 5 argued that introspection reveals the essential nature of our conscious states. Analytic phenomenology builds on this, taking our introspective grasp of the nature of consciousness as a crucial source of data for metaphysical enquiry. This methodology is explored in relation to contemporary debates on composition, and a phenomenological argument for presentism is outlined to give an example of how analytic phenomenology might be applied outside of the mind–body problem. The datum of consciousness is hugely neglected in contemporary philosophy; proper appreciation of it has the potential to revolutionize metaphysics in the analytic tradition.

We employ words like “cause” both to structure an investigative architecture and to register concrete physical data in light of that strategic background. As a result, “cause”’s referential significance becomes very complicated as the word progressively enters fresh patches of application. Jim Woodward’s studies have demonstrated the central role that considerations of manipulative control play in mapping out the contours of these strategic specializations. In contrast, analytic metaphysicians have attempted to carve out an a priori pre-science of causal necessity that falters through ignoring these developmental considerations. All in all, this essay presents a critique of necessitarian thinking not unlike that offered by Quine in his well-known “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”

This chapter discusses the useful distinction between practitioners of Anglo-American analytic metaphysics and epistemology; they can be roughly divided between the deflationists and the traditional theorizers. The first group contains postpositivists, who tend toward scientism and naturalism, and “ordinary language” philosophers, who focus on the facts of mundane praxis and champion literature and the arts as the equal of science as disclosive of truth. The second group, on the other hand, contains neo-Thomistic metaphysicians, philosophers of language, right-wing Sellarsians, and left-wing Sellarsians. The members of the theorist camp, varied though they are, share the view that philosophical reflection is a means of coming to learn something general and indeed necessary about the structure of the world as well as our place in and understanding of it. The goal of this chapter is to determine where Davidson fits in all of these.