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Metaphysics, History of [addendum]

The Critique of Metaphysics

In the years just before and after World War II a decidedly negative attitude toward metaphysics pervaded the analytic tradition. Before the war the logical positivists appealed to their empiricist criterion of significance to conclude that taken at face value as claims about the nonlinguistic world, metaphysical statements are literally meaningless. After the war ordinary language philosophers were not much kinder in their assessment of metaphysical claims. Here, Ludwig Wittgenstein led the charge with his claim that metaphysical statements are nothing more than nonsense born of linguistic confusion; but even ordinary language philosophers who found the Wittgensteinian critique overblown thought defenders of traditional metaphysics naöve if not totally misguided. Then, in the space of just a single year, two books appeared that did much to soften these pervasive antimetaphysical prejudices: P. F. Strawson's Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959) and Willard Van Orman Quine's Word and Object (1960). Although each of these books was written by a philosopher whose roots were squarely within one of the two traditions that had been so critical of metaphysics, both were avowedly metaphysical works, and both exerted enormous influence on succeeding generations of philosophers.

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