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Hot Topics in Metaphysics?

Brian Leiter

Readers have been asking for awhile that I run some more "hot topics" threads, like the earlier ones on ethics and epistemology.  I apologize for not running these more frequently, and will plan on running more of these in 2009.  So what are some of the hot topics in "metaphysics"?  The specialty as a whole seems to be thriving (much to the distress of Quineans and retrograde positivists!).  All the classic topics (time, persistence, identity et al.) seem to have received significant recent discussion, and the metaphysics of causation also seems to have returned to center stage in the last ten years.  Post your comments, below, and the more detail the better.  Also feel free to post links to on-line resources (papers, blog discussions, etc.).  Post only once; comments may take awhile to appear.

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16 responses to “Hot Topics in Metaphysics?”

  1. Leslie Wolf

    Great question Brian. I am a graduate student who works mostly on objects, persistence, and modality. Here are some of the hot topics, as I see them:

    (1) Time (eternalism, non-eternalism (including presentism); substantivalism and its rivals)
    (2) Tense (serious tensing, detensing)
    (3) Persistence (endurantism, perdurantism, stage theory)
    (4) De re modality (essentialism, anti-essentialism, conventionalism, Quinean eliminativism)
    (5) Mereology, composition, and coincidence. Questions here include: Is composition unrestricted? Is it unique? How are composition and identity related?
    (6) Realism vs. anti-realism.
    (7) Modality generally. Questions here include: What are the varieties of necessity? (See, e.g., Kit Fine's recent paper on the topic.) Is modality primitive, or does it reduce? If it reduces, to what does it reduce? If it reduces to worlds, what are worlds? What is the range of non-actual possibilities? The debate on haecceitism (this also falls under(4)).
    (8) The nature of metaphysical explanation; the in virtue of relation. Relatedly, supervenience principles.

    I will stop here. Clearly, the above list is far from exhaustive. Moreover, there are some entailments and instances of overlap among these areas.

    By the way, while I think that there are many hot topics in metaphysics today, I also think that some topics should be getting more attention than they usually do. These include: relations; the nature of kinds; the distinctions, if any, among facts, states of affairs, events, etc.; universals and tropes.

    Reply
  2. Tuomas E. Tahko

    One especially hot topic in analytic metaphysics at the moment, and to a certain extent a new one, is metametaphysics or metaontology. A number of major conferences about this topic have been organized in the last couple of years, and of course there is the Metametaphysics volume coming out, edited by Chalmers, Manley & Wasserman (http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/Metaphysics/?view=usa&ci=9780199546008).

    In general, I find the metametaphysics trend a very welcome addition to contemporary metaphysics, but I have some reservations about how 'meta' it really is: most of the stuff on this topic that is out there focuses on individual debates, such as 3D vs. 4D, rather than pursuing the topic from a genuinly metaphilosophical point of view. The most interesting questions under this heading concern the nature of metaphysical inquiry: what is metaphysics about, and what is our epistemic access to metaphysical truths. It seems to me that these questions are closely related to questions concerning the nature of a priori reasoning and modal epistemology. Hopefully we will see more material about these topics soon.

    Reply
  3. Gabriele Contessa

    For what they are worth, here are my two (biased) cents on some of the topics that are going to be metaphysically fashionable for the next season:
    Nature of properties (esp. quidditism, pure powers, etc.) and laws (esp. contingentism vs. necessitariansim), essentialism and de re necessity without possible worlds.

    Reply
  4. John Turri

    Dispositions.

    Reply
  5. Tomáš Sobek

    Fictionalism

    Reply
  6. V. Alan White

    The plentitude of pladitudinist presentists.

    Reply
  7. doris

    This thread got me wondering about what is meant by "hot" in philosophy. Some of the topics above are laws (which made me think of Armstrong's 1983 book), dispositions (which made me think of Sober 1982 and Martin 1994) and realism/anti-realism (which made me think of the 1988 Midwest Studies).

    Now I don't know much about M&E, so I went to the corresponding "hot" thread for ethics (linked in the OP) where I found particularism (which made me think of Dancy 1983) and virtue (which made me think, after I stopped thinking about Aristotle, of Anscombe 1958).

    I'm being selective in my examples, of course, and other topics mentioned seem less venerable. But it is tempting to suppose either that "hot" doesn't entail "new," or that "new" can be used for fairly (or very) mature literatures, ones spanning several academic generations or more.

    I guess there's something to both alternatives; most obviously, "hot" might be taken to mean something like "widely discussed" (or "widely discussed by the right people"), which need not entail novelty. (If "hot is taken to imply something like "cutting edge," matters may look a bit different.)

    Anyway, in looking at these discussions, it is hard not to be struck by the majestic pace of philosophical inquiry. Is this a mis-impression? If it is not a mis-impression, does philosophy differ from other fields in this regard?

    –doris

    Reply
  8. Gabriele Contessa

    doris,

    Leaving aside the questions about the pace of progress in philosophy (which I don't think this is the appropriate place for discussing), this is how I interpreted Brian's question (Brian, please correct me if I've misinterpreted your question):

    'If a student interested in metaphysics who is just starting their PhD now were to ask you which would be a good topic for their research, what would you suggest?'

    Or more precisely, since topics in philosophy go in and out of "fashion" for all sort of reasons (and I don't mean this necessarily in a pejorative sense) and a PhD is a huge long-term investment, which do you think are the topics that are going to be still "in" (or even become "in" again) in five to ten years?

    Admittedly, it's a very hard question to answer but I also think it's very helpful for starting PhD students to see what people working in the field would answer. In any case, if this is the correct interpretation of the question, I don't see why one should assume that a topic needs to be "novel" in order for it to be "hot".

    Reply
  9. Jonathan D. Jacobs

    I would say 1) Meta-metaphysics, and 2) dispositions/powers/capacities and accounts of various other things in terms of them (properties, causation, laws, modality). (Though I share the same biases as Gabriele, so take that for what it's worth.)

    Reply
  10. Alastair Wilson

    In Oxford, and in the world as it appears to an Oxford grad student, I'd say the focus is on:

    – Meta-ontology – non-Quinean theories of ontological commitment, truthmaker theories, fundamentality, formal mereology, the possibility of gunk, fictionalism.

    – Modality – the epistemology of modality, the relationship between different modalities (epistemic, physical, metaphysical, 'conceptual'), and dispositions and their relations to laws, counterfactuals, habituals, probabilities, causes.

    – Time – presentism, objective becoming, the teachings of relativity.

    Reply
  11. Carl Seaquist

    Maybe this is a reflection of how metaphysicians approach the world, but in the previous two threads people gave explanations of trends and listed names of people to read (in some cases even hyperlinks). In the present discussion there are mostly bare lists of topics. What's "hot" about, say, dispositions or causality? I mean, causality is always an important topic in some sense, but what accounts for it being particularly hot NOW?

    Maybe this is what Doris was getting at: how does a list of hot topics in metaphysics differ from a list of major topics in metaphysics? Or are all major topics currently, and always, hot? Gabriele: I don't think the question is exactly one of fashion, but rather what topics are currently in play, which have useful work being done in them, and likely will continue to leave room for interesting work for the next 5-10 years (thus being worthy topics for dissertators). Also, Gabriele, I'd add to your list another criterion: what topics have become hot in the last 5-15 years, such that those of us recently out of school might not have encountered the most recent trends in scholarship when we were still in the ooursework stage.

    Reply
  12. doris

    "Or more precisely, since topics in philosophy go in and out of "fashion" for all sort of reasons (and I don't mean this necessarily in a pejorative sense) and a PhD is a huge long-term investment, which do you think are the topics that are going to be still "in" (or even become "in" again) in five to ten years?"

    Why aren't questions regarding the pace of philosophical progress (or change) relevant to the above question? Wouldn't it be helpful, if one wanted to know what will be "in fashion" in five or ten years, to know how quickly (or slowly) fashions change?

    Furthermore, if my sense of philosophy's "majestic" pace is right, the question of hotness (though definitely of professional interest) is not a very pressing one for graduate advising, since a topic that is hot enough to generate a thriving literature (in or around that topic) when a student starts her PhD is pretty unlikely to be not-hot when she finishes, even if her pace to completion is itself majestic. Indeed, a student who began his dissertation on dispositions or laws in the early eighties would be — if people are right about the hot topics — right on track to defend his dissertation on a hot topic in 2009. (It is of course possible that those topics have gone in in out of fashion several times during the past quarter century, so that a dissertation on laws in, say, 1993 would have been professional suicide. But I'm skeptical, and would need to see evidence.)

    My advice is to advise one's students to pick a worthwhile topic that will sustain their interest, work their butt off, and not sweat hot.

    –doris

    Reply
  13. Brian-not-Leiter

    For my own part, I like these sort of threads; in particular, I like hearing the state of play in fields I don't work in. That said, it's disappointing to see them degenerate into debates about what "hot" means or what stance a person should take toward hot topics qua hot topics. How about some more assessments of the field, and less meta-commentary?

    Reply
  14. Derek Bowman

    In the Theaetetus Socrates says that philosophers, unlike those who appear before the courts, are like free men, since we are unconstrained by the water clock and able to direct our conversations to whatever topic strikes our interest. Given our roots, it's hardly surprising that a similar tendency reproduces itself in this sort of forum. There's also at least a superficial irony to wanting to hear that meta-metaphysics is a hot topic but having little impatience for meta-commentary. Of course none of this shows that one can't find this tendency counterproductive – by his own account, it seems Socrates was a bit of a pest. (In that vein, I hope the moderator will delete this post if he finds it a distraction from the purpose of this thread).

    Reply
  15. Tamler Sommers

    Anonymous raises an important point. How about some more meta-meta-commentary about the appropriate type of commentary for this sort of thread?

    Reply
  16. Allan Hazlett

    I'd like to shamelessly plug two "New Waves in Metaphysics" sessions at the upcoming Pacific APA meeting in Vancouver:

    http://www.centenary.edu/philosophy/aizawa/society-for-the-metaphysics-of-science/events
    http://www.cassetteradio.com/hazlett/newwaves/

    Not sure how "new" relates to "hot," but these sessions (and the book) might be of interest.

    For my part, I think some of the most exciting recent stuff is: Ross and Ladyman's "Everything Must Go," the "Metametaphysics" volume (mentioned above), and Ted Sider's new book ("Writing the Book of the World").

    Reply

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