The Primacy of Metaphysics

Abstract

Abstract Is the metaphysics of a domain prior in the order of philosophical explanation to a theory of intentional contents and meanings about that domain? Or is the opposite true? This book argues from the nature of meaning and intentional content to the conclusion that content and meaning are never prior to the metaphysics. For every domain, either a metaphysics-first view or a no-priority view is correct. Metaphysics-first views are developed for several specific domains. For extensive magnitudes, a new realistic metaphysics is developed, and this metaphysics is used to explain features of the perception of magnitudes, and to elucidate analogue computation and analogue representation. A metaphysics-first treatment of time is developed and used to develop new accounts of temporal representation, and to address some puzzles about time and present-tense content. A metaphysics-first treatment of subject and the first person develops a new account of the ownership of mental events by subjects, and argues for a greater role of agency in the first person than in earlier accounts. A noncausal metaphysics-first view is developed for the natural numbers and the real numbers. The account gives an explanatory priority to the application of numbers to properties and to ratios of magnitudes. The final chapter of the book argues the materials earlier in the book permit a new account of the limits of intelligibility. Spurious concepts, such as absolute space, are ones for which there is no account of the relation that would have to hold for a thinker to latch onto it.

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