The Review of Metaphysics

what is distinctive about metaphysics as a mode of thought that emerged in the fifth century before the Common Era? How did it emerge out of early ways of conceptualizing the world as a whole, and why? Many answers have been proposed. One common view is that earlier modes of thought personify natural agencies; once this is abandoned, the way is open for discerning more complex regularities among natural events.¹ Another view is that the process of "rationalization" introduced by the Greeks involves an implicit appeal to the individual's natural intelligence, in contrast to a dependence on an "inherited stock of wisdom."² A third view is that the first Greek philosophers introduced inference as a way of navigating conceptual relationships, independent of the sorts of personal interactions among divinities related in mythical narrative.³ According to a fourth account, the mode of rationality that allowed for the development of ancient Greek metaphysics was a social [End Page 3] practice with the aim of persuasion, brought on by more democratic involvement in societal deliberations concerning law and policy.⁴

To these I add a fifth way of answering the question. Crucial to the emergence of Greek metaphysics is explicit distinction of ontological/causal priority and posteriority. Ancient Greek scientific explanations developed out of older, archaic modes of conceptualization, which I maintain have deep parallels with modes of conceptualization shared by many nonliterate cultures. Such modes of thought rest on an implicit worldview which can be called a metaphysics, in a loose sense, and are still worthy of philosophical consideration.

I begin with a red flag that will be raised for many as soon as we start talking about the metaphysical traditions of nonliterate cultures. What counts as a metaphysical tradition? I make some distinctions. In the loosest sense, an account or tradition is metaphysical if it reflects a coherent worldview concerning the kinds of beings that there are and how they are related to one another. According to a stricter sense of the term, a tradition is metaphysical if it involves working through this worldview in an explicit and systematic matter. In an even stricter sense, a tradition is metaphysical if, in addition to being explicit and systematic, it merits being classified as "philosophical," itself not an unproblematic term. I here stipulate that an account is philosophical if it does not rest on premises that are specific to certain cultural traditions and employs inferential arguments that are in principle subject to refutation.

Generally speaking, there are two ways in which a tradition that is metaphysical in the strictest sense can listen to one that is metaphysical in a looser sense. First, a metaphysician might examine the latter tradition in order to explore how, historically, it served as the root for the former. An example is Aristotle's interest in Hesiod as expressing metaphysical intuitions that later philosophers unpacked.⁵ By studying [End Page 4] the ontological presuppositions of the sort of account from which our own metaphysics is derived, one learns more about our own ontological presuppositions and what we gain from them.⁶ This sort of dialogue carries with it the danger that the later thinker presupposes that—in the spirit of "you have to start somewhere"—the earlier thinkers were simply doing a bad job working through their own theories; Aristotle has often been accused of precisely this.⁷

Another sort of dialogue is possible as well. An alternative metaphysical tradition can reveal the possibility of a radically different way of conceptualizing the causal and ontological structure of the world, one with its own advantages. In such a case there is shared set of problems at issue, shared points of reference within the philosophical literature, and a shared understanding of what philosophical argument is. But philosophical insight might also emerge from the kind of dialogue in which a developed metaphysics that conforms to certain standards of inferential argument confronts a way of thinking that is metaphysical in a looser sense. A substance-based ontologist can be led to reflect on whether the world has to be cut up as she does by studying Aztec...