Metametaphysics

David Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He works in the philosophy of mind and in related areas of philosophy and cognitive science. He is especially interested in consciousness, but is also interested in artificial intelligence and computation, in philosophical issues about meaning and possibility, and in the foundations of cognitive science and of physics. David Manley is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. His papers in metaphysics and epistemology have appeared in such journals as Mind, The Journal of Philosophy, Noûs, and The Philosophical Quarterly.Ryan Wasserman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington University.

• 1. Introduction: A Guided Tour of Metametaphysics ; 2. Composition, Colocation, and Metaontology ; 3. Ontological Anti-Realism ; 4. Carnap and Ontological Pluralism ; 5. The Question of Ontology ; 6. The Metaontology of Abstraction ; 7. Superficialism in Ontology ; 8. Ontology and Alternative Languages ; 9. Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics ; 10. Ways of Being ; 11. Metaphysics after Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks? ; 12. On What Grounds What ; 13. Ontological Realism ; 14. Ontology, Analyticity, and Meaning: The Quine-Carnap Dispute ; 15. Answerable and Unanswerable Questions ; 16. Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment ; 17. Must Existence-Questions Have Answers?

Metametaphysics is an excellent collection of papers about the nature and methodology of metaphysics written by the subject's movers and shakers. It will be of great interest to anyone enamored, repulsed, or mystified by metaphysics.