… is the subject of an article worth reading: Metaphysics After Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks?, by Huw Price in the journal Metametaphysics. A friend of mine passed this around, and I thought that blog readers would enjoy it. Here is a link to the paper and the quote below will give you the gist of Price’s argument.
What’s haunting the halls of all those college towns–capturing the minds of new generations of the best and brightest–is actually the ghost of a long-discredited discipline. Metaphysics is actually as dead as Carnap left it, but– blinded, inpart, by these misinterpretations of Quine–contemporary philosophy has lost the ability to see it for what it is, to distinguish it from live and substantial intellectual pursuits.
Also this is super cool:
http://www.crispian.net/ScienceMapv0.37.png
Check it out if you haven’t seen it already.
Thanks Amy!
I’m going to read this later tonight, but just glancing the last part makes me very curious about this paper.
Hope you like it, Edgar.