First a housekeeping comment. It turns out that this blog went mostly
dormant when I began full time graduate work in philosophy two years ago. It was a wonderful outlet for my thoughts when
I had a different sort of day job, but now I have trouble making time for it. In
any case, I note that its tenth blogiversary recently passed, and I’m grateful
for all who have read or commented over that time.
One thing I’ve been thinking about again is whether our
metaphysical (modal) intuitions are any good.
Reading Ladyman and Ross (Everything Must Go) was one trigger for this. Another was reading (but not finishing) Peter
Unger’s All the Power in the World. The former included a strong critique of
contemporary metaphysics, making the case that its disconnection from modern
physics renders it futile. The latter
book can be viewed as L&R’s worst nightmare: a freeform conversion of
imagination into metaphysical conclusions which is completely
unconvincing. (See Katherine Hawley’s
review of L&R here, and Timothy O’Connor’s review of Unger here -- obviously
most contemporary analytic metaphysics is much more disciplined and better argued
than Unger’s book).
Clearly we make mistakes relying on our imagination and common
sense intuitions. What also perhaps could be
better appreciated is the fact that leveraging insights drawn from physics
(implicitly or explicitly) can easily go wrong.
This happens both because the physics is outdated (and is always
provisional anyway), and because the formalisms of physics do not and
arguably cannot represent all the relevant aspects of nature.
Still, along with my other interests, I will do metaphysics
as best I can. After all, I only have this one shot at trying to understand the world!
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