ABSTRACT
In a paper entitled “Meta-ontology” (1998) Peter van Inwagen launched a new critical debate about the foundations of metaphysics and ontology. This debate has been further developed in the diverse fields and positions of recent metaontology, which also include various attempts “to deflate” ontology, in a style that was certainly not intended by van Inwagen’s original proposal. The year 1998 also saw the publication of Jonathan Lowe’s The Possibility of Metaphysics. The book contains a preliminary chapter which its author felt to be of such importance that he made its heading the title of the whole book The Possibility of Metaphysics. In this chapter, I intend to discuss recent metaontological attacks on metaphysics and ontology coming first from contemporary “linguistic turn” philosophy (namely, Quantifier-Pluralism, Quantifier-Variance, Maximalism), then from Physicalism, and finally from Neo-Carnapianism (namely, Easy Ontology, Modest Ontology). I will discuss these critiques with the help of some conceptual tools borrowed from Lowe’s argumentation against “Semanticism”, “Scientism”, and “Neo-Kantianism” in his Possibility of Metaphysics. In doing so, my aim is to demonstrate the relevance of Lowe’s philosophical work, particularly from the perspective of the inevitability of metaphysics as first philosophy.
