Loux treats universals (realism vs. nominalism), concrete particulars (substrata vs. bundles, persistence through time), propositions, and modality (necessity and possibility). He handles matters will a degree of explicitness, thoroughness, and evenhandedness. The text is challenging at points–I attribute this to the fact that metaphysics cannot be dumbed down.

All in all, quite thorough and an excellent introduction to contemporary general metaphysics.
Rating: 4 / 5

For me, at least, there is the glaring omission of any sort of contribution that A. Whitehead (the 20th century’s pre-eminent metaphysician)made to the field, but that’s understandable in an introductory text.

This is philosophy. Go for it.
Rating: 4 / 5

In his book, 1984, Orwell described a contrived language he called “newspeak”, designed to render politically incorrect ideas inexpressible. But before Orwell there were Russell and Whitehead, who contrived a symbolic logic that distorts ideas they deemed philosophically incorrect by combining logical quantification with expression of existence. As Whitehead wrote in his “Foreword” to Quine’s Ph.D. dissertation titled A System of Logic: logic shapes metaphysical thought.

Thus in his “On Universals” Quine argued that in the Russellian logic realism must be expressed by quantifying over predicates so they reference universals as “entities”. And he co-authored with Goodman “Steps toward a Constructive Nominalism”, a nominalist manifesto, in which all philosophers are classified as either nominalists or “platonists” depending on whether or not predicates are quantified so they reference entities. I believe that anyone who says that universals are “referenced” or who uses the phrase “abstract entities” fully deserves to be labeled a Platonist.

But Loux uses the rhetoric from the Russellian nominalist newspeak. In the “search inside this book” screens at this Amazon web site the reader will find him reporting (p. 20) that realists say universals are shared “entities” and are “referents” of predicates.

I ask Loux: What happened to signification? The symbolic logician Alonzo Church recognized sense (i.e. signification) as well as denotation (i.e. reference) in the functional (i.e. predicate) calculus. I ask Loux: What happened to supposition, which distinguishes reference from signification? In his book titled Meaning and Necessity Rudolf Carnap explicitly affirms that intensions (i.e. significations) may be said to be objective without invoking any hypostatization (i.e. reference), and are indifferent to either concrete or abstract objects. I ask Loux: Since the demise of logical positivism does the Russellian predicate calculus have any applications in philosophy or anywhere else? Is Loux trying to appear contemporary with the Russellian rhetoric? I see murky writing.

Muddled:

Loux is sympathetic to Aristotle and unsympathetic to Quine, the pragmatic realist, who rejects first philosophies with their prejudicial ontological criteria for scientific criticism, and who affirms ontological relativity in which ontological commitment is subordinated to empirical testing.

Ontological relativity started as an analogy: Quine relativized ontology as Einstein relativized time. Einstein posited relativistic time as real time instead of Newton’s absolute time, and he rejected Lorentz’s making relativistic time apparent time. Likewise Heisenberg invoked this Einstein precedent for his own realistic Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory’s positing of duality and indeterminacy. Today physicists describe reality in terms of superposition, nonlocality and Calabi-Yau spaces in eleven dimensions. Quine generalized beyond physics to our global web of beliefs.

Realism is a natural, primordial, irrepressible prejudice motivated by disappointments in our beliefs including falsifications of our scientific theories. On the other hand ontology is anything but natural or primordial. It is an elaborately complex linguistic artifact that evolves and that has a cultural history. It is reality as cognitively captured by the artifactual semantics of language expressing our accepted general beliefs including our tested and currently nonfalsified scientific theories.

But in Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic and in this book Loux rejects ontological relativity, and he calls philosophies using ontological relativity “anti-Realism”. In fact ontological relativity and relativized semantics do not oppose realism, but rather they enable it in this age of scientific change. I do not find this book contemporary. Loux’s “Realism – anti-Realism” locution is a false dichotomy. I see muddled thinking.

Marginalized:

While a student I found Notre Dame’s philosophy faculty unsympathetic to contemporary pragmatism and its scientific realism. When I left their graduate school of philosophy I took with me the opinion that their academic culture is a marginalized backwater preferring to protect the past rather than forge the future with new thinking. I see in this book a textbook in Notre Dame metaphysics for Notre Dame philosophy students, who will graduate to teach in other Catholic philosophy schools.

Readers who are cognizant of the influence of modern science on philosophy – notably how quantum theory occasioned the emergence and ascendancy of contemporary pragmatism – are likely to be more critical of this book than other reviewers at this Amazon site.

Thomas J. Hickey
Rating: 1 / 5