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Metascience (2010) 19:161185
DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9323-5
BOOK SYMPOSIUM
Protecting rainforest realism
James Ladyman, Don Ross: Everything must go: metaphysics naturalized, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 368 49.00 HB
P. Kyle Stanford Paul Humphreys
Katherine Hawley James Ladyman Don RossPublished online: 30 March 2010 The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
P. Kyle Stanford
James Ladyman and Donald Rosss broadside against traditional analytic metaphysics embodies the most admirable characteristics of a good slap across the face: it is forceful, frank, and delivered in response to sufcient provocation. Ladyman and Ross are quite right to point out that much of analytic metaphysics, when it seeks to take the ndings of the empirical sciences into account at all, appeals instead to what they call a domestication of those ndings into a more intuitively comfortable picture of the physical world that appeals to little things, microbangings, and a containment metaphor. And they are right to suggest that
P. Kyle Stanford (&)
Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-5100, USAe-mail: [email protected]
P. Humphreys
Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia, Cocke Hall 105, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA e-mail: [email protected]
K. Hawley
School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9AR, Scotland, UKe-mail: [email protected]
J. Ladyman
Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected]
D. Ross
School of Economics, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]
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there is little point in trying to guide our metaphysics by or reconcile it to this unholy chimera of antiquated science, popular science, folk science, science ction, and commonsense or philosophical intuition, an enterprise whose products they deride as the philosophy of A-level chemistry. Worst of all, Ladyman and Ross are surely also right to point out that much of what happens in contemporary analytic metaphysics takes place with a complete lack of concern for the ndings of the sciences at all, proceeding instead to attempt derive substantive results about ways the world is, might be, or must be simply by reection on our intuitions and concepts.
Of course it is not an a priori, analytic, or necessary truth that such conceptual analysis is a misguided or hopeless...