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30
October

Syllabus

Written by Tuomas. // Comments Off Posted in:

Quantification and Ontological Commitment
Quine’s views on quantification and ontological commitment are very much present in the contemporary debate, i.e. ’to be is to be the value of a (bound variable)’. We will not focus on the historical details though. The primary purpose is to remind you of the background and terminology. We will also critically engage with the Quinean conception of ontological commitment and consider the role of quantification in formulating ontological questions.

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Metaphysical Realism and Fundamentality
The notions of fundamentality, ground, essence, and priority, as well as dependence are central in many recent revisionary accounts of metaphysics and its methodology. We will look into some recent positive suggestions which attempt to defend metaphysical realism in terms of these notions.

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Deflationism About Metaphysics
Deflationism about metaphysics claims that metaphysical questions have been illegitimately inflated – either they are not substantial at all, have somehow been misformulated, or they should be answered strictly in terms of linguistic or conceptual content. We will consider some deflationist challenges.
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Modal Knowledge and Metaphysical Knowledge
Knowledge of modality and metaphysical modality in particular is considered to be an important form of metaphysical knowledge. But there are difficult questions regarding modal epistemology, e.g. does conceivability entail metaphysical possibility, what is the relationship between modality and essence, and what is the role of counterfactual knowledge?
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Metaphysics and Natural Science
We can only scratch the surface of the debate concerning the relationship between metaphysics and natural science, but this is obviously an important topic. Much of the recent deflationism in metaphysics springs from the claim that metaphysicians have not taken recent scientific results into account, at least not in sufficient detail. Could science do the work of metaphysics, or can there be input from metaphysics to science?
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The Possibility of Metaphysics
Finally, I will present what I believe to be the most promising line in defence of the possibility of metaphysics. This consists of adopting a Finean understanding of the relationship between essence and modality, and of a broadly Aristotelian methodology of metaphysics.

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