Analytic philosophy is once again in a methodological frame of mind. Nowhere is this more evident than in metaphysics, whose practitioners and historians are actively reflecting on the nature of ontological questions, the status of their answers, and the relevance of contributions both from other areas within philosophy (e.g., philosophical logic, semantics) and beyond (notably, the natural sciences). Such reflections are hardly new: the debate between Willard van Orman Quine and Rudolf Carnap about how to understand and resolve ontological questions is widely seen as a turning point in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. And indeed, this volume is occasioned by the fact that the deflationary approach to metaphysics advocated by Carnap in that debate is once again attracting considerable interest and support. Containing eleven original essays by many of today's leading voices in metametaphysics, Ontology After Carnap aims both to deepen our understanding of Carnap's contributions to metaontology and to explore how this legacy might be mined for insights into the contemporary debate. This collection will be of interest to scholars and students working in metaphysics, semantics, philosophical logic, metaphilosophy, and the history of analytic philosophy.

No detailed description available for "Linguistic Frameworks and Ontology".

This volume aims to develop the easy approach to ontology, showing how it leads to both a first-order simple realism about the disputed entities and a form of metaontological deflationism that takes ontological disputes themselves to be misguided, since existence questions may be answered by straightforward conceptual and/or empirical work. It also aims to defend the easy approach against a range of objections and to show it to be a viable and attractive alternative to hard ontology.

During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a "naturalistic" approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy--the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning--philosophers today largely follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. Sander Verhaegh here offers a comprehensive study of Quine's groundbreaking naturalism. Building on Quine's published corpus as well as a wealth of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, Verhaegh aims to reconstruct both the nature and the development of his naturalism. As such, Working from Within aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. Transcriptions of five unpublished papers, letters, and notes are included in the appendix.

The book contains the first systematic study of the ontology and metaphysics of Gustav Bergmann, tracing their development from early (1940s) criticisms of Carnap’s semantical theories in Introduction to Semantics, to their culmination in his 1992 New Foundations of Ontology. This involves a detailed study of the implicit metaphysical doctrines in Carnap’s important, but long neglected, 1942 book and their connection to his influential views on reference, truth and modality, (including, contrary to current opinion, Carnap’s initiating the development of predicate modal logic) that culminated in Meaning and Necessity. In dealing with various fundamental issues in ontology and metaphysics, the book discusses relevant views of major philosophers, such as Russell, Moore, Bradley, Wittgenstein, Meinong, Brentano, Husserl, Broad, McTaggart, and Quine, and of contemporary and recent figures, including D. M. Armstrong, D. Lewis, S. Kripke, J. Searle, W. Sellars, D. Davidson, J. J. C. Smart, and H. Feigl. Building on the critical studies of Bergmann, Carnap and such other philosophers, the author argues for a form of Logical Realism derived from important, but long misunderstood and ignored, aspects of Russell’s theories of descriptions, reference and truth.

Ontology and Metaontology: A Contemporary Guide is a clear and accessible survey of ontology, focusing on the most recent trends in the discipline. Divided into parts, the first half characterizes metaontology: the discourse on the methodology of ontological inquiry, covering the main concepts, tools, and methods of the discipline, exploring the notions of being and existence, ontological commitment, paraphrase strategies, fictionalist strategies, and other metaontological questions. The second half considers a series of case studies, introducing and familiarizing the reader with concrete examples of the latest research in the field. The basic sub-fields of ontology are covered here via an accessible and captivating exposition: events, properties, universals, abstract objects, possible worlds, material beings, mereology, fictional objects. The guide's modular structure allows for a flexible approach to the subject, making it suitable for both undergraduates and postgraduates looking to better understand and apply the exciting developments and debates taking place in ontology today.

Metaphysics asks questions about existence: for example, do numbers really exist? Metametaphysics asksquestions about metaphysics: for example, do its questions have determinate answers? If so, are these answers deep and important, or are they merely a matter of how we use words? What is the proper methodology for their resolution? These questions have received a heightened degree of attention lately with new varieties of ontological deflationism and pluralism challenging the kind of realism that has become orthodoxy in contemporary analytic metaphysics.This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline. It brings together many of the central figures in the debate with their most recent work on the semantics, epistemology, and methodology of metaphysics.