Metaphysical Analysis

Professor Strewson draws on his many years of teaching at Oxford University, during which he refined and developed what he regards as the most productive route to understanding the fundamental structure of human thinking.

Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as central to philosophical inquiry. In recent years conceptual analysis has been undervalued and, Jackson suggests, widely misunderstood; he argues that there is nothing especially mysterious about it and a whole range of important questions cannot be productively addressed without it. He anchors his argument in discussion of specific philosophical issues, starting with the metaphysical doctrine of physicalism and movingon, via free will, meaning, personal identity, motion and change, to the philosophy of colour and to ethics. The significance of different kinds of supervenience theses, Kripke and Putnam's work in the philosophy of modality and language, and the role of intuitions about possible cases receivedetailed attention. Jackson concludes with a defence of a version of analytical descriptivism in ethics. In this way the book not only offers a methodological programme for philosophy, but also throws fascinating new light on some much-debated problems and their interrelations.puffs which may be quoted (please do not edit without consulting OUP editor):'This is an outstanding book. It covers a vast amount of philosophy in a very short space, advances a number of original and striking positions, and manages to be both clear and concise in its expositions of other views and forceful in its criticisms of them. The book offers something new for those interested in the various individual problems it discusses--conceptual analysis, the mind-body relation, secondary qualities, modality, and ethical realism. But unifying these individualdiscussions is an ambitious structure which amounts to an outline of a complete metaphysical system, and an outline of an epistemology for this metaphysics. It is hard to think of a central area of analytic philosophy which will not be touched by Jackson's conclusions.' Tim Crane, Reader in Philosophy,University College London'The writing is clear, straightforward, and down to earth--the usual virtues one expects from Jackson . . . what he has to say is innovative and valuable . . . the book deals with a large number of apparently diverse philosophical issues, but it is also an elegantly unified work. What gives it unity is the metaphilosophical framework that Jackson works out with great care and persuasiveness. This is the first serious and sustained work on the methodology of metaphysics in recent memory.What he says about the role of conceptual analysis in metaphysics is an important and timely contribution. . . . It is refreshing and heartening to see a first-class analytic philosopher doing some serious metaphilosophical work . . . I think that the book will be greeted as an important event inphilosophical publishing.' Jaegwon Kim, Professor of Philosophy, Brown University

Two Metaphysical Naturalisms: Aristotle and Justus Buchler provides an American naturalist reading of Aristotle's "Metaphysics" with extensive literary-philological considerations of the original Greek text. Victorino Tejera defines and evaluates the underpinnings of the systematic metaphysics of Justus Buchler through the American tradition of reading Aristotle. The book expands on classical Greek thought and develops a matured stance on Aristotle's modes of knowing and Justus Buchler's systematic metaphysics. Tejera extracts from the Aristotelian-Peripatetic metaphysics the core of Aristotle's discussion of existence as existence by keeping track of the Peripatetic and Platonist interpolations of the editors who brought the text into being. The book also summarizes Buchler's Metaphysics of Natural Complexes in less technical terms to make it more accessible. With the help of Justus Buchler, Tejera reintroduces the concept of metaphysics as coordinative analysis. Finally bridging the classical with the modern, Tejera reveals a cohesive revitalization of metaphysical naturalism for contemporary scholars and students of both ancient and modern philosophy.

Medieval Skepticism, and the Claim to Metaphysical Knowledge presents three sets of essays. The first is an exchange between Antoine Côté and Charles Bolyard over Siger of Brabant’s strategy to silence the skeptic by discriminating between nobler and lesser senses and grounding certitude in sense perceptions. Second is another scholarly exchange, between Rondo Keele and Jack Zupko, over what Keele describes as Walter Chatton’s attempt to discredit Ockhamist nominalism by means of both an ‘anti-razor’, employed by Chatton to prescribe ontological commitment, and an argument strategy based on iteration and infinite regress. The last group of essays explores issues that develop out of the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas. Joshua Hochschild defends several key positions of Thomistic metaphysics against Anthony Kenny’s criticism that Aquinas’s treatment of being is inadequate, incoherent or even sophistic. Similarly, David Twetten, after laying out Aquinas’s nine versions of the proof for the Real Distinction between essence and esse, suggests one way in which Aquinas could meet the Aristotelian’s formidable ‘Question-Begging Objection’. Lastly, Scott M. Williams contends that to preserve God’s perfect knowledge of individual material creatures, Aquinas must alter his account of the unintelligibility of prime matter in the individuation of material creatures.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.