• DOI:10.1007/s10670-021-00444-3
• Corpus ID: 239302587

Making New Tools From the Toolbox of Metaphysics

@article{Arroyo2021MakingNT,
  title={Making New Tools From the Toolbox of Metaphysics},
  author={Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo},
  journal={Erkenntnis},
  year={2021}
}

• R. Arroyo
• Published 18 September 2021
• Philosophy
• Erkenntnis

In this review, I specify the metametaphysical background in which Alastair Wilson’s “The Nature of Contingency” (Oxford University Press, 2020) should be properly understood. Metaphysics, as a philosophical discipline, is standing on thin ice. The caricature of the situation is polarized, and is often presented as follows: metaphysics is either entirely extracted from science or it is entirely independent of science. There is a recent trend that focuses on the middle ground between these extremes, searching the philosophical literature for metaphysical theories that can fill the gap, i.e., leaving metaphysics as a free discipline to produce spoils for the eventual needs of philosophers of science. We can appreciate it better with the following distinction between the tasks of ontology and metaphysics, as complementary disciplines. If, on the one hand, we understand ontology as dealing with what exists, we can somehow extract the entities that are existentially postulated by scientific theories. Metaphysics, on the other hand, would be located as an extra layer, in charge of investigating questions about the nature of the entities obtained in this “naturalized ontology”. As a tailor, Wilson adjusts a metaphysical theory in order to perfectly dress the physical and ontological nuances of Everettian quantum mechanics, thus creating a metaphysical theNo funding was received for conducting this study. Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo Graduate Program in Philosophy, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, SC, Brazil Research Group on Logic and Foundations of Science (CNPq), Florianópolis, SC, Brazil E-mail: [e-mail] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-3800-8505 2 Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo ory that gives us intelligibility, with the concept of modality, in two areas: in quantum mechanics, and analytic metaphysics.