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Blogs > sinfullfunmale > My Blog

Pete says  

sinfullfunmale 58M
4 posts
9/15/2016 5:37 am
Pete says

he current renewal of metaphysics in the Continental tradition, of which SR/OOO is merely the most obvious expression, is not entirely dissimilar to the renewal of metaphysics in the analytic tradition that began in the 1970’s and has since snowballed. There was an anti-metaphysical tendency dominant in each tradition from their beginnings in the first half of the 20th century. Although there were always metaphysical outliers (e.g., Bergson, Sellars, etc.), the influence of phenomenology/post-structuralism in the Continental tradition (e.g., Heidegger/Derrida) and logical positivism/ordinary language<b> philosophy </font></b>(e.g., Carnap/Wittgenstein) in the analytic tradition cultivated a pronounced skepticism about the very possibility of metaphysical inquiry. Figures like Habermas and Rorty were even able to exploit this ‘post-metaphysical’ consensus as a means to build bridges between the traditions. The problem with the ongoing collapse of this consensus has been that the desire for renewed metaphysical speculation has rarely been accompanied by a response to the methodological problems posed by metaphysical skepticism. If you ask someone in the analytic tradition working on, say, the metaphysics of causation (e.g., Russellian eliminativism, Lewisian counterfactual analysis, causal law realism, powers metaphysics, etc.) what precisely ‘metaphysics’ is, they’ll likely say something like “the attempt to describe ‘the real structure of the world’, ‘what there really is’, ‘the fundamental constituents of nature’, etc.”, but they’re unlikely to be able to define these phrases with any degree of methodological precision. I think that if you ask someone in the Continental tradition working on, say, the metaphysics of agency (e.g., Zizekian/Badiouian ontologised Lacanianism, Deleuzian neo-Spinozism, Latourian actor-network theory, new materialism, etc.), then you’re apt to get a similar response, maybe using slightly different language. What this means is that ‘metaphysics’ has come once more to signify something like ‘first philosophy’, not in the sense of providing a methodologically perspicuous foundation for other fields, but in the sense of naming the place where we keep our foundational assumptions, whatever those assumptions happen to be.

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