Metametaphysics New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology [Paperback]

Metaphysics asks questions about existence: for example, do numbers really exist? Metametaphysics asks questions about metaphysics: for example, do its questions have determinate answers? If so, are these answers deep and important, or are they merely a matter of how we use words? What is the proper methodology for their resolution? These questions have received a heightened degree of attention lately with new varieties of ontological deflationism and pluralism challenging the kind of realism that has become orthodoxy in contemporary analytic metaphysics.

This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline. It brings together many of the central figures in the debate with their most recent work on the semantics, epistemology, and methodology of metaphysics.

1. Introduction: A Guided Tour of Metametaphysics,David Manley
2. Composition, Colocation, and Metaontology,Karen Bennett
3. Ontological Anti-Realism,David Chalmers
4. Carnap and Ontological Pluralism,Matti Eklund
5. The Question of Ontology,Kit Fine
6. The Metaontology of Abstraction,Bob Hale and Crispin Wright
7. Superficialism in Ontology,John Hawthorne
8. Ontology and Alternative Languages,Eli Hirsch
9. Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics,Thomas Hofweber
10. Ways of Being,Kris McDaniel
11. Metaphysics after Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks?,Huw Price
12. On What Grounds What,Jonathan Schaffer
13. Ontological Realism,Theodore Sider
14. Ontology, Analyticity, and Meaning: The Quine-Carnap Dispute,Scott Soames
15. Answerable and Unanswerable Questions,Amie L. Thomasson
16. Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment,Peter van Inwagen
17. Must Existence-Questions Have Answers?,Stephen Yablo

Metametaphysicsis an excellent collection of papers about the nature and metl#-