Analytic philosophy is once again in a methodological frame of mind. Nowhere is this more evident than in metaphysics, whose practitioners and historians are actively reflecting on the nature of ontological questions, the status of their answers, and the relevance of contributions both from other areas within philosophy (e.g., philosophical logic, semantics) and beyond (notably, the natural sciences). Such reflections are hardly new: the debate between Willard van Orman Quine and Rudolf Carnap about how to understand and resolve ontological questions is widely seen as a turning point in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. And indeed, this volume is occasioned by the fact that the deflationary approach to metaphysics advocated by Carnap in that debate is once again attracting considerable interest and support. Containing eleven original essays by many of today's leading voices in metametaphysics, Ontology After Carnap aims both to deepen our understanding of Carnap's contributions to metaontology and to explore how this legacy might be mined for insights into the contemporary debate. This collection will be of interest to scholars and students working in metaphysics, semantics, philosophical logic, metaphilosophy, and the history of analytic philosophy.

The analytic movement advertised its 'linguistic turn' as a radical break from the two-thousand-year-old substance tradition. But this is an illusion. On the fundamental level of ontology, there is enough reformulation and presupposition of traditional 'no entity without identity' themes to analogize Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine to Aristotle as paradigmatic of modified realism. Thus the pace of ontology is glacial. Frege and Russell, not Wittgenstein and Quine, emerge as the true analytic progenitors of 'no entity without identity, ' offering between them at least twenty-nine private language arguments and sixty-four 'no entity without identity' theories

No detailed description available for "Linguistic Frameworks and Ontology".

The Western intellectual tradition has identified rational thinking with he purely logical, excluding other kinds of thinking (such as thinking by analogy, correlation, imaginative simulation) from philosophy, without denying their indispensability in the conduit of life. The central argument of 'Unreason Within reason' is that it is this endeavor to detach the logical from other kinds of thinking which has led to the present crisis of rationality, in which reason seems everywhere to be undermining its own foundations. The concepts from which logical thinking starts are inescapably rooted in the spontaneous correlation of the similar/contrasting and contiguous/remote, which according to Jacobsonian linguistics, structures the sentences analyzed by logic. Logical thinking can turn back on itself to criticize the correlations but cannot detach itself to replace them by logically impregnable foundations. No mode of thinking -- poetic, mythical, mystical -- is inherently irrational; the function of the logical is not to replace them but to test them. Graham finds this approach relevant to the fact/value and egoism/altruism problems in moral philosophy and to the epistemological of conflicting conceptual schemes, as well as to the situating myth and mysticism in relation to philosophy and to the development of a variety of perspectivism clearly distinguishable from relativism. Graham pays special attention to Nietzche and Bataille, as representative critics of rationalism, and to Chinese philosophy, as a tradition which has not isolated the logical from other kinds of thinking. Graham's' engagement of classical Chinese and western sensibilities provides a novel context within which to reconsider issues raised by Derrida's critique of logocentrism and the new Pragmatism of Davidson and Rorty.