Читать книгу What is Metaphysics? - John Heil - Страница 10

This book is addressed to readers curious about metaphysics. Today, purveyors of serious metaphysics reside in university philosophy departments, or, at any rate, would have spent time in academic settings. The book’s aim, however, is to convince you that, far from being an effete academic pastime, metaphysics is inevitable. Each of us embraces metaphysical theses, often without recognizing them as such. Philosophers are not the only philosophers. What distinguishes card-carrying, capital-P Philosophers from everyone else is just that the Philosophers embrace metaphysical doctrines self-consciously.

Readers whose impressions of metaphysics stem from acquaintance with books featured on popular bookstore shelves bearing the label might have a somewhat different view of the subject. For those readers, metaphysics is likely to exude an aura of mysticism or maybe thoughts of tarot cards and astrological readings, coupled with a measure of unconstrained speculation. If, in picking up this book, this is what you were expecting, you might be alarmed – or relieved – to learn that the metaphysics to be discussed here comports with both hard-edged science and everyday experience. The Australians call this ontologically serious metaphysics.

So conceived, metaphysics has a long history, and a much longer prehistory. This is not a historical survey, however, but a foray into a subject matter that runs the historical gamut. One underlying theme is that, whether anyone likes it or not, metaphysics is pervasive. Self-proclaimed skeptics who dismiss metaphysics as a frivolous waste of time most often do so on the basis of unexamined metaphysical commitments of their own, commitments unlikely to survive honest scrutiny.

I will try to convince you of metaphysics’ inevitability, not by argument, but, starting with this chapter, by example. Because the book is meant to draw in nonspecialists, its focus will be on broad theses and suggestive arguments, rather than on the fine-grained details of these theses and arguments. This is not a matter of dumbing down the subject. The Devil is in the details, but the chief interest in, and significance of, metaphysics lies less in the details than in the extent to which metaphysics provides satisfying proposals for solutions to issues that lie just below the surface of everyday life, the arts, and the sciences.