Analytic philosophy is once again in a methodological frame of mind. Nowhere is this more evident than in metaphysics, whose practitioners and historians are actively reflecting on the nature of ontological questions, the status of their answers, and the relevance of contributions both from other areas within philosophy (e.g., philosophical logic, semantics) and beyond (notably, the natural sciences). Such reflections are hardly new: the debate between Willard van Orman Quine and Rudolf Carnap about how to understand and resolve ontological questions (...) is widely seen as a turning point in 20th-century analytic philosophy. And indeed, this volume is occasioned by the fact that the deflationary approach advocated by Carnap that debate is once again attracting considerable interest and support. Containing ten original and previously unpublished essays by many of today's leading voices in metametaphysics, Ontology After Carnap aims both to deepen our understanding of Carnap's contributions to metaontology and to explore how this legacy might be mined for insights into the contemporary debate. Contributors: Richard Creath, Matti Eklund, Simon Evnine, Eli Hirsch, Thomas Hofweber, Kathrin Koslicki, Robert Kraut, Greg Lavers, Alan Sidelle, Amie Thomasson, Jessica Wilson & Stephen Biggs. (shrink)
Kant -- Decomposition -- Meaning and analysis -- A substitutional theory -- Analyticity -- Consequence -- Justification and proof -- A priori knowledge -- Things, collections and numbers -- Frege -- Husserl, logical psychologism, and the theory of knowledge.
This volume portrays the Polish or Lvov-Warsaw School, one of the most influential schools in analytic philosophy, which, as discussed in the thorough introduction, presented an alternative working picture of the unity of science.
Bolzano was the first to establish an explicit distinction between the deductive methods that allow us to recognise the certainty of a given truth and those that provide its objective ground. His conception of the relation between what we, in this paper, call "subjective consequence", i.e., the relation from epistemic reason to consequence and "objective consequence", i.e., grounding (Abfolge) however allows for an interpretation according to which Bolzano advocates an "explicativist" conception of proof: proofs par excellence are those that reflect (...) the objective order of grounding. In this paper, we expose the problems involved by such a conception and argue in favour of a more rigorous demarcation between the ontological and the epistemological concern in the elaboration of a theory of demonstration. (shrink)
