Critique of metaphysics in the context of the debates between realism and anti-realism

Abstract

The present paper attempts to examine the main motives behind the critique of metaphysics. It considers how debates between realism and anti-realism can help clarify these motives. Realism is the essential feature of classical Aristotelian metaphysics. The author argues that the criticism directed against this type of metaphysics was determined by changes which occurred in early modern philosophy. While discovering the phenomenal aspects of experience, early modern philosophers treated them as an intermediary between world and mind. This approach resulted in skepticism about the possibility of genuine knowledge of reality. The upshot of Kant’s attempt to overcome this skepticism was the critique of classical metaphysics, which was to become a paradigm for subsequent critical attacks on metaphysics in the twentieth century. At the base of this approach lies the anti-realist view of ontology, according to which any ontological questions about reality canonly be meaningful when considered withina certain conceptual scheme. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, this view was criticized by externalists who, however, failed to show how concept-bound realism was possible. One of the goals of this paper is to explain how conceptualism about perceptual experience as championed by John McDowell can help argue for the possibility of a realist metaphysics. For this purpose, McDowell’s approach should be supplemented with theories stressing the active involvement of living creatures in their environment.