APA Newsletters
Spring 2000
Volume 99, Number 2

Reviewed by Sami Pihlström, University of Helsinki (e-mail: sami.pihlstrom@helsinki.fi)

These two huge anthologies of metaphysics edited by van Inwagen and Zimmerman and by Kim and Sosa are valuable guides for any undergraduate or graduate student taking a course in metaphysics or planning to write a thesis on a metaphysical topic, as well as to any teacher of philosophy. Metaphysics: The Big Questions (hereafter MBQ) contains no less than 56 readings on metaphysics, a few of them specifically written for the volume, whereas Metaphysics: An Anthology (hereafter MA) collects together 48 influential articles, many of them classics by now. MBQ includes contributions by Hume, Reid, Russell, Price, Williams, McTaggart, Smart, Chisholm, Quine, Lewis, Carnap, and Putnam, among others. The articles in MA are written by philosophers like Broad, Russell, Carnap, Quine, Kripke, Chisholm, Armstrong, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis, Fodor, Dummett, and several others.

There is, unavoidably, some overlap between the two volumes, but not much. The teacher of metaphysics may have use for both. Each book has its strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of classroom use. MBQ, with its readings on the mind-body problem and the issue of why there is something rather than nothing, covers a broader range of topics than MA (but may, therefore, give a somewhat more confusing impression to the student new to the subject). Its problems (say, free will) may be more easily understandable for the student than the rather technical issues of identity, supervenience, and causation that MA mainly focuses on. Like the Blackwell "Big Questions" series more generally, MBQ attempts to make philosophical questions "come alive for today’s students." Here, I think, the volume at least partly succeeds. Several readings contain philosophical dialogues in a Platonic style. For example, James Van Cleve’s paper on incongruent counterparts (MBQ, chap. 13), a piece not previously published, adopts this convention, which students are likely to find helpful. This is not to say, of course, that there is no abstract and difficult stuff in MBQ at all. Metaphysical issues "coming alive" to us often require formal treatment.

MBQ contains better introductions than MA. The general introduction to the book, in particular, is rather comprehensive and tries to explain very clearly what metaphysics is all about (although I shall return to its problems shortly). MA does not have a general introduction at all but only a short preface describing the general contents of the volume. On the other hand, MA is intended as a companion to the same editors’ A Companion to Metaphysics (Blackwell, 1995), which introduces numerous metaphysical issues in great detail. As a one-volume work, MBQ is, in any case, a success. However, what disturbes me in MBQ (as well as in the other "Big Questions" volumes) is the use of abridged readings: many papers or chapters taken out of books are not printed here in entirety and are, thus, relatively brief (some of them only 2–3 pages). There is no such problem in MA.

It is, of course, highly convenient to have all these texts, most of them well accessible to students, collected together in two handy volumes. The teacher of a general metaphysics course will probably have to pick up only a few carefully selected readings, whereas more specific courses on topics such as universals, space and time, or realism and antirealism can easily be built upon one of the parts of either book as a whole.

As in the case of any collection like these, it is certainly possible, from a pedagogical point of view, to criticize the editors’ choice of the articles and their arrangements of them. MBQ consists of five parts, the first of which ("What Are the Most General Features of the World?") includes 30 readings, i.e., more than half of the book. The topics covered are arranged under more specific questions: "What is the relationship between an individual and its characteristics?" "What is time? What is space?" "How do things persist through changes of parts and properties?" and "How do causes bring about their effects?" Such interrogative titles already introduce metaphysical problems to students and are thus more informative than a title like "Universals." The second part of the book, "What Is Our Place in the World?" persuades its readers to ask how appearances are related to the things that appear, what the relation between mind and body is, and whether it is possible for us to act freely. The remaining three parts are relatively short: Part Three asks, "Is There Just One World?" Part Four wonders why there is a world at all, touching the problems of whether there is an answer to this question and, if so, whether the answer involves a necessary being. Finally, Part Five questions the possibility of metaphysics itself.

The third and the fifth part might easily have been combined, since the very possibility of metaphysics is already discussed through the five readings by Quine, Putnam, and Sosa in Part Three. It is odd to find only three contributions in the last part of the book, by authors as different as Carnap and two feminist critics of metaphysics, Jane Flax and Charlotte Witt. (The inclusion of feminism in a reader of metaphysics is a good idea and may be appealing to many students otherwise suspicious of metaphysics.) A synthesis of Parts Three and Five would in fact have been encouraged by the editors’ conception of metaphysics. In the introduction, we are told that one who engages in metaphysics attempts "to get behind all appearances and to describe things as they really are" (MBQ, p. 1). What this means is that one attempts "to determine certain things with respect to certain statements (or assertions or propositions or theses), those statements that, if true, would be descriptions of the reality that lies behind all appearances, descriptions of things as they really are" (p. 2). The appearance-transcendent reality is labeled "Reality," with a capital "R" (p. 2), and the truth of metaphysical statements should, according to van Inwagen and Zimmerman, be taken literally, not metaphorically (p. 3). Now, Carnap and Flax as well as Putnam are interpreted as subscribing to the thesis of the impossibility of metaphysics in its strong form, arguing that "there is no Reality to be described" and that metaphysical statements are meaningless (p. 5; see also the introductory notes on pp. 383 and 457). The weak form of this thesis would be the claim that metaphysical statements are meaningful but we humans are unable to discover their truth or falsity (p. 5). Van Inwagen and Zimmerman urge that the weak version can be resisted by appealing to the "modest progress" we can attain in metaphysics (p. 7) and that the strong version is vulnerable to the charge of self-referential inconsistency: anyone who thinks that metaphysical statements fail some particular test of meaningfulness will have to employ, in the course of their own anti-metaphysical argument, a statement that itself also fails the same test (p. 6). The logical positivists’ strictly empiricist criterion of meaningfulness provides an example.

In Hilary Putnam’s terms, one might say that anyone who engages in metaphysics is, according to van Inwagen and Zimmerman, a "metaphysical realist," that is, believes in some basic underlying ontological structure of reality in itself. Putnam is criticized by the editors as someone who, together with Kant, Ayer, Carnap, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, has attempted to kill metaphysics (MBQ, p. 457). It is, however, problematic to classify Kant simply as an anti-metaphysician, and it is equally problematic to add Putnam on this list. At the end of his book Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 303), Putnam in fact approvingly quotes the very same statement by Etienne Gilson—"Metaphysics always buries its undertakers"—that van Inwagen and Zimmerman (p. 457) appeal to in their criticism of anti-metaphysics. Far from announcing a death of metaphysics, neither Putnam’s critique of metaphysical realism nor, say, Derrida’s deconstructionism should be read as an attempt to step outside the Western tradition of metaphysics altogether. In a sense, metaphysics is, according to these critics of metaphysics, unavoidable. These subtleties related to the concept of metaphysics are left unnoticed by the editors. Nor is, therefore, students’ capacity to assess critically and independently the status of metaphysics and anti-metaphysics much strengthened by the editors’ remarks.

Compared to these problems with defining metaphysics and anti-metaphysics, the conception of metaphysics at work in MA is more neutral—even though the definition in the preface, according to which metaphysics is "a philosophical inquiry into the most basic and general features of reality and our place in it" (MA, p. ix), is, broadly speaking, realistically biased. The issue of realism itself is, however, regarded as a metaphysical issue by Kim and Sosa; it is not simply assumed, as in MBQ, that metaphysics is necessarily metaphysically realistic in the Putnamean sense.

MA consists of nine parts: "Existence," "Identity," "Modalities and Possible Worlds," "Universals, Properties, Kinds," "Things and their Persistence," "The Persistence of the Self," "Causation," "Emergence, Reduction, Supervenience," and "Realism/Antirealism" (in this order). One may wonder why, for example, there is a separate part on the identity and persistence of things—why, that is, this topic is not discussed in the part focusing on the problem of identity in general. Are the issues of identity through time and its special case, the persistence of the self, so important that they ought to occupy two ninths of the book (which also contains a part on identity in general)? Moreover, the problem of personal identity might seem to require some background knowledge in the philosophy of mind, which, however, this collection does not cover. The problem, of course, results from the professionalization of analytic philosophy: philosophy of mind is nowadays often taken to be a special field of philosophy to be distinguished from general metaphysics, even though it is, traditionally, one of the core areas of metaphysics. The latter way of classifying the philosophy of mind is adopted in MBQ, although some of the readings on the mind-body problem (viz., the ones by Shoemaker, Parfit, and Swinburne) are actually on the issue of personal identity and overlap with MA.

As to the arrangements of the papers, it is justified to begin, as in MA, with those related to existence. Many philosophers would, however, consider the realism/antirealism issue prior to any special issue in metaphysics, even to the issue of existence. On the other hand, it may be a good idea to leave the papers on realism and antirealism for the last part of the book, since students may find this debate so abstract and confusing that it is better for them to engage in some "concrete" metaphysical disputes first. Similarly, in MBQ, the meta-level discussions of the possibility of metaphysics come last. The teacher may, of course, use the readings in any order she or he finds appropriate.

Within each part of each book under review, other selections of papers could undoubtedly have been made. It is futile to criticize the editors for their selections. But, for instance, in the part of MA focusing on emergence, reduction, and supervenience, the bias is clearly on the side of the concept of supervenience—despite a relatively recent renewal of interest in the concept of emergence among metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Students of metaphysics would, I think, profit from being able to compare these two notions in a more balanced manner. Emergentism is now represented by C. D. Broad only—not, for example, by Karl Popper, who was an influential late-twentieth-century advocate of the idea of emergent evolution. MBQ, in turn, includes nothing on emergence and very little on supervenience.

Nor is Popper’s emergentist ontology of the three worlds discussed anywhere in either MA or MBQ. It may be a rather superficial metaphysical theory, but it does nicely summarize a bunch of problems related to various classical metaphysical positions. One need not be a Popperian in order to argue that no student should pass a metaphysics course without having heard of Popper’s worlds 1, 2, and 3. As to the "plurality of worlds," Nelson Goodman’s theory of world making (certainly a metaphysical view very different from Popper’s) is not much discussed in these books, either. On the other hand, no less than five of the articles in MA (and three of those in MBQ) are by W. V. Quine. There is no doubt that Quine is an important figure—perhaps even the most important figure in the revival of metaphysics or ontology in post–World War II Anglo-American philosophy—and therefore pieces like "On What There Is" (MA, chap. 1) and "Speaking of Objects" (MBQ, chap. 43) naturally belong to these anthologies, but the total space given to Quine especially in MA seems to be an exaggeration. Similarly, the four readings by R. M. Chisholm in MBQ are perhaps a little bit too much.

Another curious anomaly is that there is almost no mention whatsoever of the role played by the tradition of transcendental philosophy in Western thought as an ongoing critique of metaphysics. Philosophical criticism of the possibility of metaphysics is hardly adequately represented by logical positivism and postmodernist feminism (which are represented in MBQ, Part Five). In the introduction to that part (p. 457), Kant is only mentioned in passing. One might argue that the transcendental tradition from Kant via Husserl to Wittgenstein and some of his followers provides a much more penetrating investigation of the possibility of metaphysics than any of the readings to be found in these books. (Cf. here, e.g., David Carr’s recent investigation of the critique of the "metaphysics of the subject" in the transcendental tradition in his The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999].) Developments in transcendental philosophy from Kant to Wittgenstein and their present-day followers also demonstrate how difficult it is to attack metaphysics without already being involved in metaphysics in some sense.

Nonetheless, these are relatively minor matters compared to the overwhelming coverage of the two volumes. Issues such as modality, the problem of universals, space and time, identity (of things in general and of selves in particular), free will, causation, and realism are given a thoroughgoing treatment by the best contemporary authors one can imagine.

A more general problem, not capable of being solved by any other particular selection of articles, results from the fact that these two books—like so many thick philosophical anthologies nowadays published by large international publishers—almost exclusively focus on metaphysics written in English, in an analytic style, in the twentieth century (and mostly over the past three decades or so). For a European philosopher, even if she or he is primarily an analytic philosopher and prefers reading philosophy in English, it may come as a surprise that Heidegger’s name cannot even be found in the index of metaphysics anthologies of this size. Nor are any other German or French metaphysicians much discussed in the articles, let alone philosophers from other non–English-speaking European countries (even if they have written their main works in English). The total absence of Heidegger is particularly astonishing in MBQ, which contains readings on the problem of why anything at all exists and may thus inspire students to reflect on Heidegger’s key question, the question of Being.

MBQ, whose texts are in general somewhat older than those of MA, does include some classical pieces by non–Anglo-American thinkers, e.g., a short excerpt from The Port-Royal Logic by Antoine Artauld and Pierre Nicole and a part of St Anselm’s Proslogion, formulating the ontological argument for the existence of a necessary being, but there is no clear motivation for picking up just these old classics out of innumerable possibilities. (Nor are the pieces by Hume and Reid on causation well motivated. Why, again, has Kant been left out? Is it just because he is regarded as an anti-metaphysician by the editors?) Compared to this inability of MBQ to justify the inclusion of the particular classical readings it does include, the self-conscious restriction of MA to relatively recent Anglo-American literature, leaving out older classics, is a respectable decision.

Even with the few classical texts to be found in MBQ, what we have in these two readers is very much recent American metaphysics, i.e., the kind of metaphysics that made a "comeback" in the 1960s and "is now flourishing as never before" despite the anti-metaphysical (positivist) origins of the Anglo-American analytic tradition (see MA, p. x). This is not, of course, the kind of metaphysics associated with the American pragmatist tradition. Charles Peirce is not mentioned in the index of MA at all and only a couple of times in MBQ (although his scholastic realism would be highly relevant from the point of view of the contemporary dispute over universals), and even though William James, A. N. Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne are mentioned a few times, their process philosophies are quite far from the analytic metaphysics pursued in most of the articles. Fortunately, a chapter of James’s posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy (1911) can be found in MBQ. In any event, the student to whom metaphysics is introduced through these books should be encouraged to supplement her or his picture of the subject by taking additional courses on the history of American and/or European philosophy.

More generally, one may argue that it can hardly be beneficial for metaphysics as a branch of philosophy, or for the teaching of metaphysics, if the analytic and Continental traditions are still so far from one another that collections like this are (as they may be) taken to cover the most important work done in metaphysics in the twentieth century. Selectivity is, of course, required in any collection to be used in the classroom, but in this case the claim that the results of the selections represent the most central contributions made in contemporary metaphysics could hardly be taken seriously by anyone who thinks that someone like Heidegger is worth reading. The selected papers represent "the major contemporary positions on the issues involved" (MA, p. x), but the relevant issues have here been significantly restricted.

Both volumes contain useful indexes (MA an index of names and an index of subjects separately), and suggestions for further reading are given in the introductions to each part. There is no general bibliography of metaphysics in either book, but there would hardly be much use for that in the classroom. The preface to MBQ (pp. xii–xiii), together with the numerous lists of supplementary readings, provides some good advice on how the material might be used together with classical texts (e.g., Descartes, Berkeley, Russell), single-author introductory works on metaphysics (by, e.g., Hamlyn, Taylor, van Inwagen), and other anthologies or upper-level undergraduate and/or graduate textbooks on metaphysics (by, e.g., Armstrong, Aune, Loux). The editors of MBQ have also included some references to works of literature (e.g., to Borges and Lovecraft) that may also make metaphysical problems seem more alive than mere dry academic philosophizing.