Ayer (1934) illustrated the pointless nature of metaphysical debates by contrasting a dispute between two art critics discussing the authenticity of a canvas attributed to Goya to a dispute between an idealist and a realist metaphysician. It is only once the role that presuppositions play in shaping the questions we ask (and seek answers to) in different forms of inquiry is acknowledged, that one can truly go beyond the uncritical dogmatic metaphysics that positivism tried-but arguably failed-to do away with.Ī. As Collingwood argued in An Essay on Metaphysics (1940)-a thinly disguised attack on Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic (1936)-the only way to go beyond the metaphysics that logical positivism critiqued is to acknowledge the presuppositions that govern our attempts to come to know reality in different domains of inquiry, and to make explicit the role that they play in giving rise to the kind of questions different forms of knowledge seek to answer. Rather than doing away with the idea that knowledge of pure being is possible, it merely placed natural science in the privileged epistemic position once occupied by philosophical reflection as a presuppositionless form of knowledge capable of disclosing reality in itself. Logical positivism, however, failed genuinely to leave metaphysics behind. Claims that cannot be found to be either true or false in this way-the argument goes-express meaningless propositions, and the treatises in which they are contained should be confined to the flames, just as Hume suggested. Logical positivism sought to put an end to what it regarded to be irresolvable metaphysical pseudo-disputes by arguing that genuine knowledge claims must be verifiable that there must be, at least in principle, evidence that can be cited to determine whether a claim is true or false.
This was not the case in the first half of the twentieth century, when logical positivism mounted one of the most scathing attacks on the very idea that the nature of reality could be known by reflection alone, a priori, from the so-called philosophical armchair.
In the philosophy of mind, panpsychists argue that the nature of reality is not quite how it is thought of by physicalists in contemporary analytic metaphysics, debates concerning the nature of time are all the rage. It would seem fair to say that today metaphysics is thriving.
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