Metaphysics is often understood as an inquiry into the fundamental structures of reality. Collingwood, by contrast, defends a view of metaphysics on which its role is not to advance knowledge of fundamental reality but to deepen our understanding of the presuppositions on which knowledge rests. On Collingwood’s view, knowledge requires explanation, explanations are answers to questions, and questions rest on presuppositions. The metaphysician’s task is to trace the entailment relations that hold between answers, the questions they seek to answer, and the presuppositions that give rise to the questions characteristic of different forms of knowledge. This exposes misunderstandings which arise when answers to a question of one kind are erroneously taken to be in conflict with answers to questions of a different kind, ones resting on different presuppositions and pursuing different explanatory goals. This chapter outlines Collingwood’s conception of presuppositional analysis and his distinctive views of the role of conceptual analysis in metaphysics. It also explores affinities between Collingwood’s conception of metaphysics and Wittgenstein’s hinge epistemology.

First, I argue that the aspiration to become like a god is an inescapable part of the human condition and is as common among atheists as among theists. I set aside the whole question of the existence of the gods and treat theology as a guide to anthropology. Ideas of the divine reveal essential truths about human beings. Second, I explore the ambivalence about this aspiration to divinity – an ambivalence found both in philosophy and in biblical religion. Third, I discuss the relation of philosophy to religion by showing that the great philosophers, especially the Socratic philosophers, have attempted to think through the presuppositions of religious thought. Fourth, I argue that common attempts to contrast Athens and Jerusalem as reason and faith are absurd. I show that the true differences between Greek philosophy and biblical religion emerge only against the background of the common project of attempting to become divine in both Athens and Jerusalem.

This chapter examines the legacy of Kuhn’s Structure for normative philosophy of science. It begins with an examination of Kuhn’s normative methodology and his position that historical cases provide evidence for philosophical claims. Kuhn’s philosophical methodology is insufficiently articulated, and his utilization of case studies is subject to objections implied by Pitt’s dilemma of case studies. The chapter subsequently examines the post-Kuhnian methodological positions of Ian Hacking, Helen Longino, Michael Friedman, and Hasok Chang. These views suggest alternative methodological strategies in the history and philosophy of science (HPS) tradition for addressing normative issues. It concludes by articulating some outstanding methodological challenges for the pluralist tradition of HPS ? associated with the Stanford and Minnesota schools of philosophy of science ? that emerged in the 1980s and remains influential.

This chapter deals with the issue of the role of philosophy in Mesoamerica and its sources. Offering an expansive account of philosophy, it argues that the sources of philosophy in ancient Mesoamerica include, but are not limited to, textual material. While there is a long textual tradition in Mesoamerica, particularly in Maya and Aztec cultures, we find philosophy in other sources as well, including architecture, art, oral tradition, and performance. The chapter describes the ways philosophy can be found in these numerous sources, and argue for the importance of philosophical interaction with anthropology, art history, and other relevant fields.

This chapter has two aims. First, I want to provide an interpretation of Kant’s critique of dogmatism, with Christian Wolff as the chief defender of that approach. I distinguish between three different characterizations of dogmatism that Kant provides. I show that Kant regards Wolff as a dogmatist in two of these senses and explain how he can consistently hold that view. Second, I aim to offer an account of Kant’s views on the relationship between his ‘critical’ method and Wolff’s ‘dogmatic’ method, since Kant suggests that the latter is not without its merits.

Given recent naturalist readings of Hegel’s metaphysics and Spinoza’s rather widespread reputation as being the most consistent rationalist, the question arises in what sense Hegel can be called a ‘Spinozist’. An analysis of Hegel’s notion of philosophy reveals that despite Hegel’s and Spinoza’s common commitment to the notion that philosophy is “the self-comprehension of universal and unconditioned truth”, Hegel thinks that Spinoza’s substance-based account renders the finite philosophers entirely explicable in terms of universal truth’s self-causing and thus undermines individual autonomy. In contrast, Hegel’s commitment to concept-metaphysics is supposed to enable him to argue that individual philosophers still exert control over their thought and remain autonomous in their acts of channeling truth. Hegel thus aims to retain Kant’s allegedly anti-spinozistic commitment to individual autonomy by grounding his notion of philosophy on concept- rather than substance-metaphysics.

Where contemporary thinkers well disposed towards Rorty tend to emphasize the significance of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, more skeptical voices are apt to impugn his relevance to ongoing debates in philosophy on the grounds that that work’s attempt to dispose of the traditional conception of the discipline in the name of a nebulous “literary criticism” is little more than an exercise in self-therapy. The contention of this chapter, then, is that the antagonism this emphasis generates is both unfruitful and ill-conceived. Taking as its starting point reactions to criticism of his early (eliminativist) materialism, it argues that Rorty’s work in the 1970s offers a vindication of the activity of traditional philosophy, albeit within the broader conception of intellectual inquiry we’ve come to call neopragmatism and – latterly – “cultural politics.” From this perspective, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity is just one (perhaps self-revealing) prophetic-theoretical proposal amongst many that neopragmatism/philosophy-as-cultural-politics makes possible. But that in turn shows how important this period of Rorty’s work is, not only to understanding his later output but also to elucidating the options available to contemporary philosophy.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Richard Rorty’s legacy is the sheer variety of the philosophical imprint from which has thought was formed. His thought not only ranged across Analytic, Continental, and of course Pragmatist philosophy but extended as well into engagements with history, literary criticism, and a wealth of novels. Rorty’s command of such a wide philosophical range is expressive of a kind of metaphilosophical pluralism that was largely missing in his own philosophical milieu and which continues to be sorely needed today. This essay characterizes Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism. It begins with an excavation of Rorty’s metaphilosophy in terms of his signature idea of vocabularies. With this in view, it then turns to a neglected source for Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism. This source is found in an unexpected branch within philosophical pragmatism, namely that of his onetime teacher, Richard McKeon. Like other pluralisms that preceded his, Rorty’s metaphilosophy will be of enormous value just so long as philosophy remains unsettled about how to account for its disagreements, which is to say just so long as philosophy generates needs for addressing metaphilosophical questions, which is effectively to say just so long as there is such a thing as philosophy.

This chapter explores two influential conceptions of the role of common sense in philosophical theorizing from early analytical philosophy, due to G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both approaches set out an important function for our everyday certainties to play in the epistemological enterprise, albeit in very different ways. For Moore, our common-sense certainties serve as a kind of reasonable stopping point in philosophical disputes. In particular, where common sense confronts philosophical theory, we can reasonably side with common sense. While Moore claims that our common-sense certainties have an epistemic weight simply in virtue of being common-sense certainties, for Wittgenstein the certainty that attaches to these commitments entails that they have no rational status at all. Nonetheless, this doesn’t prevent them from having a crucial import to epistemological questions. By setting these two philosophical approaches side by side, we gain an important perspective on how common sense might be appealed to in philosophical theorizing.

In “Reductionism,” Rorty takes up the question “Can we abandon reductive analysis as a method of philosophical discovery and still keep the intellectual gains which have accrued from its employment as a method of deciding what questions to discuss?” Rorty uses the notion of reductionism to both present a synoptic vision of the history of Western philosophy and put forward an original metaphilosophical position. After presenting the twentieth-century program of reductive linguistic analysis as a mature form of the seventeetn century’s “reductionist conception” of the goal of inquiry, he examines J. O. Urmson’s arguments, ultimately finding that Urmson falls short of applying reductive analysis to the technical vocabularies of philosophers. Even though Rorty agrees with Urmson that most reductive analyses, judged by their own standards, are unsuccessful, Rorty nevertheless thinks a basis for distinguishing useful from useless analyses is possible. We also see here Rorty’s early interest in eliminability, which shortly thereafter becomes the basis for a distinctive contribution.