I recently posted the penultimate version of my ‘Metaphysics as the First Philosophy‘, forthcoming in a volume edited by Ed Feser: Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics (Palgrave Macmillan). I don’t think that Palgrave has officially announced the volume yet, but I guess I can reveal some of the other contributors; they include Robert Bolton, Stephen Boulter, David Charles, Kathrin Koslicki, David S. Oderberg, E. J. Lowe, Gyula Klima, and others — so it’s a pretty impressive volume! This is in Palgrave Macmillan’s Philosophers in Depth series. (I’ve also contributed to the Spinoza on Monism volume in this series.)

Aristotle talks about ‘the first philosophy’ throughout Metaphysics -– and it is metaphysics that Aristotle considers to be the first philosophy -– but he never makes it entirely clear what first philosophy consists of. What he does make clear is that the first philosophy is not to be understood as a collection of topics that should be studied in advance of any other topics. In fact, Aristotle seems to have thought that the topics of Metaphysics are to be studied after those in Physics. In what sense could metaphysics be the first philosophy in the context of contemporary metaphysics? This is the question examined in my chapter. Contemporary topics such as fundamentality, grounding, and ontological dependence are considered as possible ways to understand the idea of first philosophy, but I argue that the best way to understand it is in terms of essence.

Another, related thing that I wanted to mention. My Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume was recently reviewed in NDPR by Robert C. Koons, as I’ve mentioned. Koons briefly criticised mine and Lowe’s approach to metaphysical modality, noting that it may be closer to Plato’s than Aristotle’s. Alexander Pruss has developed an alternative approach to modality in his recent book, which Koons mentioned, but I can’t comment on that as I haven’t read the book (yet, it’s waiting on my shelf though). An observant reader (John) commented that this may not be quite accurate. John notes that In Book Theta there are suggestions to the effect that actuality is ontologically prior to capacity or possibility, and the line that myself and Lowe (and, of course, Kit Fine) take regarding the ontological priority of essence over modality doesn’t directly conflict with that.

I have a couple of things to say about this. I already mentioned something about this in comments, but I thought it would be useful to dedicate a post to the issue, since it’s quite central to my research. I discuss these matters, albeit briefly, in the first philosophy paper, and I’ve made use of relevant passages below.

Firstly, there is a certain tension between the idea that essence precedes existence (which entails that possibility precedes actuality), and what we see especially in the Posterior Analytics, but I believe that there’s an explanation to this, which is Aristotle’s peculiar conception of ‘species’, i.e. that they are eternal. From my discussions especially with Kathrin Koslicki and some others who know their Aristotle better than I do (like my colleague Mika Perälä here in Helsinki), it seems that it may not be unreasonable to revise the Aristotelian picture somewhat. This contrasts with the views of some Aristotle scholars. In a paper from the 70s (‘Essentialism and Semantic Theory in Aristotle’, The Philosophical Review 85:4), Robert Bolton suggests that, for Aristotle, knowledge of existence typically precedes knowledge of essence. Bolton’s case is based on his reading of the Posterior Analytics (especially 93a16–24). For instance, Aristotle discusses whether someone could know what a goatstag is, but denies that this is possible -– even though one may know what the name signifies -– since goatstags do not exist (92b4–8).

The reason why this may not be as serious as it first seems is that Aristotle holds only species to have essences (Metaphysics 1030a11–17); and, like I said, that species are eternal (e.g. Generation of Animals, 731b24–732a1). We can now see that, for Aristotle, there could never be an essence of a non-existent thing, such as a goatstag, for Aristotle thinks that there could be no such thing. Therefore, if we were to share the Aristotelian conception of species, we would indeed have to agree with him that there is no goatstag essence. Surely, only things that could possibly exist can have essences, and since there are no actual goatstags, Aristotle regards them to be impossible in this sense. Aristotle does not use these exact terms, but we can perhaps take Aristotle’s notion of actuality to correspond with what I am here calling existence. Similarly, my use of possibility roughly corresponds with Aristotle’s potentiality. Accordingly, we can formulate the idea at hand as follows: actuality precedes potentiality. It follows that this peculiar doctrine may be an artefact of the Aristotelian conception of species, although this brief analysis is hardly conclusive.

In his review of my book, Koons also makes the following claim regarding Aristotle’s position:

Epistemologically speaking, there is no clear priority in either direction. Instead, there is a dialectical interplay between our knowledge of the possible and of the actual.

In fact, I also subscribe to this view, at least if we specify it a little bit. That’s because I think that even though essence, or possibility, has ontological priority in individual examples, scientific and philosophical inquiry in general proceed in such a way that our knowledge of possibility is constantly being complemented by our knowledge the actual. I’ve described this process in my earlier papers on the relationship between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, and coined it ‘the bootstrapping relationship’.

I’ve posted a new draft paper called ‘Boundaries in Reality‘ into the research section of the website. The paper is just a slightly revised version of a paper that has been gathering dust for a while now. I revised the paper for a special issue of Ratio on Classifying Reality, edited by David S. Oderberg and also including contributions from E. J. Lowe, Gary Rosenkrantz, Hugh Mellor, Barry Smith, and Stephen Boulter. Wiley-Blackwell will later publish the articles in book form as well.

This paper was originally aimed as a sort of reply to Achille Varzi’s paper ‘Boundaries, Conventions, and Realism‘, now out in the volume Carving Nature at Its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science (see also an NDPR review of the volume by P. D. Magnus). Varzi puts forward a conventionalist challenge to realism, based on the idea that there is no single correct way to carve up reality: all our classificatory schemes are based on psychological biases or pragmatics. This resembles the Dummettian ‘amorphous lump’ view of reality.

The papers in the Classifying Reality special issue are, on the contrary, concerned with revisionary accounts about the categorical structure of reality, and my own paper defends the view according to which there must be some boundaries — genuine joints — in reality, and that our classificatory schemes can track these boundaries at least to some extent. Abstract of the paper below, and the the full draft is here.

This paper defends the idea that there must be some joints in reality, some correct way to classify or categorize it. This may seem obvious, but we will see that there are at least three conventionalist arguments against this idea, as well as philosophers who have found them convincing. The thrust of these arguments is that the manner in which we structure, divide or carve up the world is not grounded in any natural, genuine boundaries in the world. Ultimately they are supposed to pose a serious threat to realism. The first argument that will be examined concerns the claim that there are no natural boundaries in reality, the second one focuses on the basis of our classificatory schemes, which the conventionalist claims to be merely psychological, and the third considers the significance of our particular features in carving up the world, such as physical size and perceptual capabilities. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that none of these objections succeed in undermining the existence of genuine joints in reality.

See also my recently published paper ‘On the Common Sense Argument for Monism‘ (with Donnchadh O’Conaill), which is partly related to this topic.

I gave a talk with the above title at the ECAP 7 conference in Milan two weeks ago. Several people were interested in the paper, and as I’ve now had the chance to make some minor revisions to it, I thought I’d post the draft here. I’m not entirely happy with the paper yet, but at this point it might be useful to get some feedback, so I turn to you, my dear readers.

The paper discusses the relationship between essence and modality in a Finean context. Like Kit Fine has argued, I take it that metaphysical modality reduces, or is grounded in, essence. I do not defend or comment on Fine’s arguments to this effect though, rather, I develop on this idea and attempt to clarify how modality can be understood in terms of essence. In the Finean account, a crucial part of this understanding is the grounding relation, which is manifested via the ‘is true in virtue of the nature of…’ predicate, e.g. metaphysically necessary propositions are true in virtue of the natures of all things (as opposed to some proper subset of all things). It is this predicate that I am interested in.

Although the account that I will suggest is sympathetic to the Finean picture, I consider there to be one serious caveat in the Finean account: there is no reliable method which would enable us to distinguish between what could be called genuine metaphysical possibilities and metaphysical impossibilities, or, as I call the latter, pseudo-possibilities — that is, metaphysically impossible yet conceptually or logically possible worlds, such as worlds in which gold is not an element, cats are not animals, water is XYZ instead of H2O, and so on. I propose that we have to introduce a stricter understanding of the relationship between essence and modality to rule out pseudo-possibilities altogether. My account has one significant cost though: it requires abadoning the duality of possibility and necessity, i.e. it is not the case that p is possible iff not-p is not necessary, and it is not the case that p is necessary iff not-p is not possible. I also suggest that we should define different kinds of possibility and necessity not in terms of the Finean ‘is true in virtue of the nature of…’ predicate, but in terms of two different predicates — one for possibility and one for necessity — that latch on to what makes a certain proposition possible or necessary, rather than what makes it true:

MET: p is metaphysically necessary (possible) iff p is necessary (possible) in virtue of the nature(s) of the (concrete, non-conceptual) entities relevant to p.

CON: p is conceptually necessary (possible) iff p is necessary (possible) in virtue of the nature(s) of the (abstract) concepts relevant to p.

LOG: p is logically necessary (possible) iff p is necessary (possible) in virtue of the nature(s) of the (abstract, non-conceptual) logical entities relevant to p.

Defining necessity and possibility in terms of what is ‘relevant’ for the proposition in question requires further explanation. The idea is that p is metaphysically necessary only in virtue of the particular nature or natures of the entities that are actively involved in making p necessary. What I mean by active involvement is that particular features of the essence of a given object give raise to the modal constraints that it manifests; this serves to distinguish genuine modalities from the supposed modal truths that emerge only passively, namely via the lack of modal constraints. Modal truths that emerge passively are, due to the manner of their introduction, (pseudo-)possibilities: for instance, if a given scenario is not contradictory, i.e. it is not ruled out by conceptual or logical analysis, then it is generally judged to be possible.

In the full paper I go on to analyze different kinds of modality and demonstrate how they can be accommodated in the proposed account in such a way that pseudo-possibilities can be ruled out.

Comments are most welcome! I know it’s a bit of a crazy view, but I’m keen to see how far I can take it.

I’ve posted a draft of my commentary on Kathrin Koslicki’s The Structure of Objects (OUP, 2008). The commentary will be published in a special issue of the Italian journal Humana.Mente. The issue is on Composition, Counterfactuals and Causation, and is edited by Massimiliano Carrara, Roberto Ciuni, and Giorgio Lando. Other contributors include Andrea Borghini, Louis deRosset, Ned Hall, Henry Laycock, Giuliano Torrengo, and others. I’ve linked to the penultimate version of my commentary, comments are welcome! In her book Koslicki presents a neo-Aristotelian account of composition; my review compares this account with the more traditional Lewisian approach.