Together with my colleague, Gertrudis Vandevijver and our students in our reading-group, Holes (do you catch the reference?), I have been reflecting on one of the classic papers of contemporary metaphysics (Hawthorne & Cortens, 1995), "Toward Ontological Nihilism." I have philosophic reservations about the project (which I may share if I can formulate them crisply), but I want to make a few sociological-historical observations about it. Okay, maybe a few philosophic ones, too.
1. The piece follows the rhetorical/argumentative-methodology of Bennett's Rationality (which I like to call his Fable of the Bees). This is no surprise because Bennett (who was one of Hawthorne's teachers) is generously cited in the paper (although that much underestimated book isn't).
2. The paper is a kind of a revenge of repressed (?) Oxford philosophy of the 60s (Strawson, Bennett, Dummett) on Quine. To simplify: 2A) it gives up on the obsession on quantification and focuses instead on grammatical form (thank you Boris Demarest); 2B) the authority of science is tacitly dropped (so regimentation of scientifically privileged language is not our enterprise anymore). (My reservations would center on this point--not that I am favor of the authority of science, but I think it is a problem not to pretend it isn't a problem at all.)
3. It must be (is it???) one of the first papers in which Bradley (recall my earlier blogging) is favorably cited since the founding myths of analytic philosophy, in which Bradley is the unnamed villain -- much as the Scholastics are in Descartes -- got set in stone.
4. Interestingly, it is not a value-free enterprise. Its ruling virtue is a kind of voluntarist freedom (at least for the metaphysician); see p. 157 espcially. In doing so, it echoes -- much to my surprise -- Carnap (who also valued such voluntarism), even though it is in all other respects remarkably un-Carnapian.
5. I think the piece should have been called, Towards Ontological Agnosticism (thank you Liesbeth DeKock).
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