Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

For Carnap and Quine, metaphysics is about what there is. I argue for a re-orientation of metaphysics away from questions of what there is, towards questions of what grounds what. This is a return to an Aristotelian conception of metaphysics, on which the ultimate grounds ("the substances") are "the principles and causes" of all else. Metaphysics so conceived is an explanatory discipline, which seeks to identify what is fundamental, and to explain how derivative entities are grounded in what is fundamental. I will argue for the merits of an explanatory conception of metaphysics, and focus on rendering precise some of the underyling notions of metaphysical structure ("grounding") via the sorts of structural equation models now widely used for causal modelling. What emerges is a unified conception of metaphysical and causal explanation, backed by directed dependency relations.