ABSTRACT
Metaphysics in the analytic tradition since 1945 has been a sustained reaction to the anti-metaphysical position of logical positivism. In his Logical Syntax of Language (1937), Rudolf Carnap lists a number of philosophical problems and notions that arise from mistaking puzzling features of language for substantive questions about reality. The traditional theories of truth, realism, universals, essential properties, time, causation, and so on, the subject matter of metaphysics since Aristotle, are, he charges, all due to confusion of language in its ordinary use, in the 'material mode' and language that really is about language, the 'formal mode' of speech. They confuse trivial, or meaningless assertions about language with substantive claims about the world. Though positivism denied the meaningfulness of most traditional issues, in the very linguistic approach of that denial one can see a somewhat traditional nominalist position emerging. What followed in the 1930S and 1940S were developments in logic and the philosophy of science that vindicated some aspects of the traditional problems of truth and the nature of necessity, causality, space and time. Since 1945 there has been a steady process by which problems have come to be seen as meaningful (although perhaps primarily logical or empirical in nature) and then become subject to many of the sorts of theories that had been presented at various other times in the history of metaphysics. The story, then, is of the re-emergence of metaphysics, primarily a certain Aristotelian tradition in metaphysics. The role of modal notions of necessity and essence clearly indicate that origin. For the most part there has also been a relative lack of interest in the metaphysical questions of the Kantian tradition. Discussions of free will versus determinism, the
nature and place of the self and of God in the natural world, have not been central. Rather, the emphasis has been on questions of ontology and the most general features of the natural world, time, space and matter. One Kantian issue that has come to the centre of discussion again is the problem of realism versus idealism, now formulated as realism versus 'anti-realism'.
