UPDATE: This volume has now been published!

I have hinted towards a project that I’ve been working on in a few previous posts to this blog, and I am now happy to finally be able to advertise the project in detail. It is an edited volume entitled Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics, and I have just been offered a contract for this volume by Cambridge University Press.

The volume brings together 14 new essays from leading philosophers working in, or at least sympathetic to what might be called ‘Aristotelian’ metaphysics. ‘Aristotelian’ in this context should not be taken to refer to Aristotle’s metaphysics, this is not a historical volume on Aristotle’s philosophy. The label merely refers to a certain conception of philosophy and metaphysics, perhaps best described with the idea of metaphysics as a ‘first philosophy’, that is, metaphysics as prior to science, or as a study of the most fundamental structure of reality. It should be noted however that not all the contributors necessarily commit to this type of view, but they do all take it seriously. Accordingly, to a certain extent this is a volume on the methodology of philosophy and metaphysics, although these matters will not necessarily be discussed explicitly. However, the motivation behind this volume is exactly to showcase this conception of metaphysics and to contrast it with a more deflationary conception of metaphysics (and its methods) which could perhaps be called ‘Quinean’. The list of contributors is as follows:

• Professor Alexander Bird, University of Bristol
• Professor Tim Crane, University of Cambridge
• Professor Kit Fine, New York University
• Dr. Louis M. Guenin, Harvard University
• Professor John Heil, Washington University
• Professor Joshua Hoffman, University of North Carolina
• Dr. Kathrin Koslicki, University of Colorado
• Professor E. J. Lowe, Durham University
• Professor Storrs McCall, McGill University
• Professor David Oderberg, University of Reading
• Professor Eric Olson, University of Sheffield
• Professor Gary Rosenkrantz, University of North Carolina
• Professor Peter Simons, Trinity College Dublin
• Dr. Tuomas E. Tahko, Durham University

In addition, I will write an introduction to the volume. Although this is not a volume on Aristotle’s metaphysics, many of the themes of the volume are familiar from, or inspired by Aristotelian metaphysics, specifically: ontological categories, the notion of substance, essence, identity, ontological dependence, and the ontology of species. Some of the contributions defend neo-Aristotelian accounts of the topics. Other proposed topics, which also relate to Aristotelian themes, include quantification, natural kinds, persistence, and powers. I will provide more details about the contents of the volume at a later stage.

I am hoping to get the volume together some time during summer 2010 and hopefully it will be out soon after that. I am grateful to Dr. Hilary Gaskin from Cambridge University Press for her support during the early stages of the project.

In other news, my article ‘On the Modal Content of A Posteriori Necessities’ has now been published online at Wiley InterScience. E-mail me for a pdf-offprint if you haven’t got institutional access to Theoria. Or simply download the penultimate version from my papers section.