The Nature of Metaphysics [Book Review]

Philosophical Studies (Dublin) 7:195-196 (1957)
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Abstract

Eleven Oxford dons and one guest-speaker from Melbourne in this candid series of talks, first delivered on the radio in 1955, seem to share a conscious disadvantage in respect of their subject, the irrepressible science of metaphysics—like a group of disconcerted bankers who return to trade with a one-time bankrupt, whose currency has irresistibly hardened again and for whom they now concert a limp welcome and a scratch set of trading rules. As Mr. Warnock wryly notes: “It would be impossible to deny that respect or distaste for metaphysics is, though no doubt it should be an intellectual matter, in fact very largely a matter of temperament; and disagreements of this variety are notoriously liable to be heated and vehement, liable also to be long drawn out, inconclusive, and rather unprofitable”. After the eighteenth century bankruptcy proceedings instituted by David Hume and the subsequent doldrums of university philosophy, the empiricist suspicions of Victorian Britain led to the positivist hostility of the twentieth century towards that traditional, standard science, which Europe never substantially devalued. The current return in England is both a forced retreat from brash futility in the field of urgent values and of scientific postulates, and a cautious reconnaissance of old positions. The present exploratory discussion is not unlike an international truce in its tendency to bog down in procedural analysis and to substitute this new scholasticism for an engagement in the substantial business of metaphysics. Metametaphysics buries its head in sand of its own sophisticated creation; and the individual talks are not as distinct nor as simple as their titles might suggest.

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