1
Introduction

1.0 Metaphysics Is . . . What?

This book is addressed to readers curious about metaphysics. Today, purveyors of serious metaphysics reside in university philosophy departments, or, at any rate, would have spent time in academic settings. The book's aim, however, is to convince you that, far from being an effete academic pastime, metaphysics is inevitable. Each of us embraces metaphysical theses, often without recognizing them as such. Philosophers are not the only philosophers. What distinguishes card-carrying, capital-P Philosophers from everyone else is just that the Philosophers embrace metaphysical doctrines self-consciously.

Readers whose impressions of metaphysics stem from acquaintance with books featured on popular bookstore shelves bearing the label might have a somewhat different view of the subject. For those readers, metaphysics is likely to exude an aura of mysticism or maybe thoughts of tarot cards and astrological readings, coupled with a measure of unconstrained speculation. If, in picking up this book, this is what you were expecting, you might be alarmed - or relieved - to learn that the metaphysics to be discussed here comports with both hard-edged science and everyday experience. The Australians call this ontologically serious metaphysics.

So conceived, metaphysics has a long history, and a much longer prehistory. This is not a historical survey, however, but a foray into a subject matter that runs the historical gamut. One underlying theme is that, whether anyone likes it or not, metaphysics is pervasive. Self-proclaimed skeptics who dismiss metaphysics as a frivolous waste of time most often do so on the basis of unexamined metaphysical commitments of their own, commitments unlikely to survive honest scrutiny.

I will try to convince you of metaphysics' inevitability, not by argument, but, starting with this chapter, by example. Because the book is meant to draw in nonspecialists, its focus will be on broad theses and suggestive arguments, rather than on the fine-grained details of these theses and arguments. This is not a matter of dumbing down the subject. The Devil is in the details, but the chief interest in, and significance of, metaphysics lies less in the details than in the extent to which metaphysics provides satisfying proposals for solutions to issues that lie just below the surface of everyday life, the arts, and the sciences.

1.1 Metametaphysics

You might think that the place to begin would be with a definition of "metaphysics," a succinct characterization that would give you some idea of what you are in for. Would that it were so. Definitions of subjects - mathematics, psychology, poetry, for instance - rarely assist those looking for help in discerning the nature of the subject matter. To the extent that they are intelligible to the nonspecialist, definitions tend to be vague and impressionistic. Psychology is the study of human behavior. Yes, but how does this distinguish psychology from biology, anthropology, or marketing? When precise definitions are available, they are most often of interest only to those already familiar with the subject.

I could tell you that metaphysics is the study of being or the nature of reality, but that does not set metaphysics off from hosts of other subjects including, but not limited to, the sciences. I could tell you that metaphysics provides our most general characterization of what there is, leaving more specific characterizations to the various sciences. But again, this does little to distinguish metaphysics from physics, the most general of the sciences.

Some suppose that metaphysics is distinguished from the sciences in being a priori: metaphysics endeavors to derive truths about reality from truths that require no further warrant, truths that are self-evident. If you want a model, think of Euclidean geometry in which theorems are deduced from a small number of axioms purporting to be self-evident. Physics, in contrast, like the other sciences, relies on a posteriori reasoning that begins and ends with empirical observation and investigation.

As the example of Euclidean geometry suggests, however, characterizing metaphysics as relying exclusively on reason would fail to distinguish metaphysics from mathematics. Mathematics is essential to the sciences, but unlike metaphysics, it has no worldly pretenses. Its utility depends not on its capturing truths about reality, but in description and calculation. In its simplest form, calculation takes, as inputs, truths or purported truths, and yields outputs that must be true if the inputs are true.

In putting it this way, I am skating over scores of important features of mathematics. My aim is not to show how or why mathematics works, however, but only to note that, if metaphysics were a priori it would be in good company.

But is metaphysics a priori? Not by my lights. Although metaphysics does not compete with the sciences - or, for that matter, with poetry or fiction - metaphysics seeks to provide a systematic account of categories indispensable to any endeavor to say what there is, and that is not something that could be arrived at by reason alone.

The last sentence is hopelessly abstract, but you can get a feel for what I have in mind by considering three historically central categories: substance, property, relation. Substances are objects possessing various properties and standing in various relations to one another. Take this tomato, a candidate substance. The tomato is a something that has various qualities, its properties. The tomato is red, roughly spherical, and has a definite mass, and stands in a variety of relations - the tomato is next to a beetroot, and on top of your kitchen counter.

1.2 Ontology

In embracing the categories of substance, property, and relation you would be betting that these would prove indispensable in any attempt to say what there is. Suppose you describe what is on the desk in front of you: a book, a pencil, and a tablet. (Your mobile phone is across the room.) To a first approximation, books, pencils, and tablets are propertied substances standing in assorted relations to one another. As you move further afield you encounter trees and rabbits, living substances. In front of you is a street sign, and a dustbin, and in the west the sun is setting. All of these things would seem to qualify as substances, all possess various properties and stand in various relations to one another, and to endless other things.

Moving beyond the everyday, you can find substances, properties, and relations in play in the sciences. Physics and chemistry speak of particles and atoms, for instance. Atoms themselves are made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. These might be thought to be substances, possessing various properties (mass, charge, spin), and standing in assorted relations - spatial, temporal, causal.

Although we commonly take for granted that material bodies are made up of particles, we could be mistaken. What we treat as particles might turn out not to be granular, self-contained, mobile bits of matter, but to be energy concentrations in fields, or local thickenings in space. In that case, the fields or space itself would be the substances, and particles would turn out to be properties, modifications of fields or of space.

I mention these seemingly far-fetched possibilities only by way of example, only to illustrate the relation between the sciences, and particularly physics, and metaphysics. At the heart of metaphysics is ontology. Ontology offers a systematic account of categories of being or reality. If an ontology of substances, properties, and relations were adequate, you could see these as serving as what C. B. Martin calls placeholders, the details being supplied by the various sciences. If material bodies are made up of particles, for instance, the particles would be the substances. If particles were replaced by fields, the substances would be the fields. The sciences have a way of surprising us, evolving unpredictably. Still, it is not easy to envision a scientific revolution that dispensed with propertied substances of some sort, however strange.

I have emphasized the relation of metaphysics to the sciences, but the sciences are not our only avenues to knowledge. Poetry, music, fiction, drama, and their cousins have much to teach us. What distinguishes the sciences and makes them particularly relevant to metaphysics, especially ontology, is their systematic nature. You can learn much by reading Middlemarch or Harry Potter, or by watching High Noon or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny on Netflix, much that you would not encounter in a textbook on psychology or biology. Thinking of literature as in competition or incompatible with the sciences would be analogous to thinking of psychology and biology as in competition with one another and with physics and chemistry.

Although I shall often turn to the sciences to illustrate metaphysical themes, nothing I have to say here requires any sort of scientific sophistication. One reason for keeping the sciences in the foreground is that this serves as a reminder that metaphysics resembles the sciences in offering accounts of what there is - not by augmenting or supplanting scientific findings, but by providing placeholders for whatever categories emerge in the course of our most rigorous efforts to get to the bottom of things.

1.3 What Now?

If you have been paying attention you will know that this book is meant to be...