Can Metaphysics Be Naturalized? And If So, How?
Can Metaphysics Be Naturalized? And If So, How?
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.
Keywords: Metaphysics, analytic metaphysics, naturalized metaphysics, metaphilosophy, science and philosophy
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .