Online research in philosophy

In 'Time and Being' Heidegger claims that the task is to 'cease all overcoming and to leave metaphysics to itself'. This paper asks what it actually means to leave metaphysics to itself, and how we are meant to understand the difference between "leaving metaphysics to itself" and "overcoming metaphysics". To understand this distinction, the paper compares Heidegger's later position with those of Husserl and Wittgenstein and with his own earlier position expressed in Being and Time. While we find different interpretations of what it means to leave metaphysics to itself, this paper shows that none of them, apart from Wittgenstein's, draw a clear distinction between leaving metaphysics to itself and overcoming metaphysics. Indeed, rather than leaving metaphysics to itself, Heidegger in 'Time and Being' comes to articulate a negative metaphysics. To avoid such a move, this paper draws on Wittgenstein to show how we can truly leave metaphysics to itself and cease all overcoming.

Introduction: Bachelard belittled -- The forgetting of space and Gaston Bachelard's concrete metaphysics -- The temple and the cabin: Heidegger's metaphysics of being-in -- The unheimlich house: Danielewski's concrete being-in -- Our first home: Irigaray's metaphysics of being-within -- The hut in the storm: Bosco's concrete being-within -- Conclusion: the recovery of space and Gaston Bachelards concrete metaphysics.

Joan Stambaugh's translations of the works of Heidegger, accomplished with his guidance, have made key aspects of his thought and philosophy accessible to readers of English for many years. This collection, writes Stambaugh, contains Heidegger's attempt "to show the history of Being as metaphysics," combining three chapters from the philosopher's Nietzsche ("Metaphysics as a History of Being," "Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics," and "Recollection in Metaphysics") with a selection from Vortrage und Aufsatze ("Overcoming Metaphysics").

What is the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics? Is phenomeno- logy metaphysical neutral, is it without metaphysical bearings, is it a kind of propaedeutics to metaphysics, or is phenomenology on the contrary a form of metaphysics, perhaps even the culmination of a particular kind of metaphysics (of presence)? What should be made clear from the outset is that there is no easy and straightforward answer to the question concerning the relation between phenome- nology and metaphysics. The term ‘metaphysics’ is simply too ambiguous. Even among phenomenologists the term is used and understood in quite different ways, and the answer to the question has consequently varied accordingly. Let me brief- ly illustrate this with a few examples.

A systematic overview of modern metaphysics, A Survey of Metaphysics covers all of the most important topics in the field. It adopts the fairly traditional conception of metaphysics as a subject that deals with the deepest questions that can be raised concerning the fundamental structure of reality as a whole. The book is divided into six main sections that address the following themes: identity and change, necessity and essence, causation, agency and events, space and time, and universals and particulars. It focuses on contemporary views and issues throughout, rather than on the history of metaphysics.

Ethics as a guide into metaphysics -- Virtue and practice -- Self-implicating knowledge: the practice of intellectual virtue -- Dependent animal rationality: epistemology as anthropology -- Metaphysics and/as practice -- Metaphysics, theology, and the practice of naming God -- The presence of a hidden God: idolatry, metaphysics, and forms of life -- Portraits of the artist: eros, metaphysics, and beauty -- Metaphysics of contingency, divine artistry of hope.

In this paper we set out a Quinean approach to metaphysics. We evaluate Eli Hirsch's and Amie Thomasson's deflationary metaphysics and set out our metametaphysical framework.

When I say that my conception of metaphysics is Aristotelian, or neo-Aristotelian, this may have more to do with Aristotle’s philosophical methodology than his metaphysics, but, as I see it, the core of this Aristotelian conception of metaphysics is the idea that metaphysics is the first philosophy . In what follows I will attempt to clarify what this conception of metaphysics amounts to in the context of some recent discussion on the methodology of metaphysics (e.g. Chalmers et al . (2009), Ladyman and Ross (2007)). There is a lot of hostility towards the Aristotelian conception of metaphysics in this literature: for instance, the majority of the contributors to the Metametaphysics volume assume a rather more deflationary, Quinean approach towards metaphysics. In the process of replying to the criticisms towards Aristotelian metaphysics put forward in recent literature I will also identify some methodological points which deserve more attention and ought to be addressed in future research.

This is a review of The Metaphysics of Hyperspace (OUP: 2005) by Hud Hudson.

Hud Hudson offers a fascinating examination of philosophical reasons to believe in hyperspace. He explores non-theistic reasons in the first chapter and theistic ones towards the end; in the intervening sections he inquires into a variety of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects that are either generated by the hypothesis of hyperspace or else informed by it, with discussions of receptacles, boundaries, contact, occupation, and superluminal motion. Anyone engaged with contemporary metaphysics, and many philosophers of religion, will find much to stimulate them here.