Against metaphysical rationalism

Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science

Thomas Aquinas regularly claims that metaphysics is not merely scientific, but the highest and most certain of all the sciences, and his conception of metaphysics is one of the boldest and most epistemically ambitious in the history of philosophy. This book presents a new account of Aquinas's metaphysics, approached fr...

On the Metametaphysics of Law: A Revisionary Perspective

This article proposes a revisionary approach to the meta-metaphysics of law. It challenges the growing tendency in analytic jurisprudence to treat questions about the nature of law as metaphysical problems that require employing explanatory metaphysical tools (e.g., grounding). Instead, it argues that metaphysical cl...

The progress and value of metaphysics

Recent critiques of metaphysics tend to focus on arguing that it is methodologically unreliable, otherwise epistemically deficient, and/or irrelevant to practical concerns. Defenders counter that metaphysics is continuous with science, an unavoidable part of inquiry, and/or already yielding valuable results. So far, ne...

The metaphysical explanation of modal and non-modal truths

In this paper I discuss an initially very plausible principle about metaphysical explanation, which has recently been explicitly defended. Suppose some q metaphysically explains the metaphysical necessity of p. Does q then also metaphysically explain p’s truth? The principle at issue, call it ‘(NT)’, gives an affirmati...

Descartes in Two Dimensions

Descartes' cogito argument is perhaps the most well‐known philosophical argument, the conclusion of which is supposed to be a form of rationalism that allows for contingent a priori knowledge of the world. In this short note, I argue that, in fact, the all important statement, ‘I am, I exist’, should be analyse...

Why intellectualism?