The Possibility of Metaphysics

Abstract

Abstract Begins with a defence of realist metaphysics against its many enemies. Metaphysics, it is argued, is an autonomous and indispensable intellectual discipline whose distinctive task is to chart the domain of real possibilities—a task which requires us to identify both the basic ontological categories into which all possible beings are divisible and the characteristic relations of ontological dependency in which beings of various ontological categories necessarily stand to one another. Central parts of this task are carried out in the rest of the book, which focuses especially on the key notions of substance, identity, and time. The unity of the concrete world as one world existing in time ultimately depends, it is argued, upon the existence of fundamental substances, which persist primitively through processes of qualitative change. And even abstract necessary beings, such as the objects of mathematics, ultimately depend for their existence, it is claimed, upon there being a concrete spatiotemporal world of enduring substances.

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