Abstract

Although often taken to lie at the very heart of philosophical inquiry, metaphysics has, at least since the time of Hume and Kant, frequently been surrounded by uncertainty and doubt as to its nature, possibility, and significance. The dominance of idealist philosophy in the late nineteenth century, and the reaction against it in the early twentieth, was often seen in terms of the dominance and subsequent decline of metaphysical styles of thought. Indeed, during the first half of the twentieth century “metaphysics” seemed to have become, in many quarters, an almost entirely pejorative term. Yet if the first half of the century was, within the English-speaking world, largely antimetaphysical, the second half of the century, and especially the last thirty years or so, has been much more favorable to metaphysical thinking. This has been partly a result of the increasing importance of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind within contemporary philosophical thinking; it has also been a consequence of new developments in logic, especially modal logic; and it has been given additional impetus by the resurgence of interest in past philosophers, and so also in the metaphysical systems that they developed—Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Locke, and Reid have all seen something of a renaissance over recent years and so has their metaphysics. Within contemporary English-speaking, “analytical” philosophy, then, metaphysics would seem to be alive and well.