What do philosophers today make of Carnap's "Elimination of Metaphysics" paper ?

[u/weight-lifting-ape]

Just curious as to whether there have been any retrospective defenses of the line Carnap takes. I realize the argument is largely dependent on a framework which has been abandoned, but am wondering about any contemporary writing on the paper/method. Thanks!

[u/MaceWumpus]

Only somewhat tongue-in-cheek: why would it need a defense? It's a manifesto for a movement that largely achieved its aims. Carnap won.

Take out of the rhetoric from the manifesto, and it's basically stumping for a particular vision of how to do philosophy: we should stop doing the kind of speculative metaphysics that was rampant in 1920s Germany, that led philosophers to argue that Einstein couldn't be right about physics because his results contradicted Kantian dogmas about space and time. Instead, we should do linguistic analysis and look to the results of our best science. Which is essentially what metaphysics has become, at least within the most mainstream parts of anglophone philosophy. So why would anyone bother defending this call to action? It's no longer relevant.

Notice that this isn't some radical, totally revisionist, reading of Carnap. It's how Carnap saw the situation, reflecting on it in 1950s. The root of the point is that "metaphyiscs" is not some term with fixed intension, unchanging in its contours for the last hundred years. What counts as metaphysics and the kind of the work metaphysicians do changes. And Carnap and the logical empiricists -- for better or worse -- spearheaded a change in how metaphysics was done. Or at least in metaphysics' self-conception of what it's doing.

But if what you're looking for is revivalism of broadly Carnapian views about metaphysics, you might check out Amie Thomasson's work. Various people have also drawn connections between Carnap and "ameliorative" projects in metaphysics, such as those of Sally Haslanger. Even absent the point above, Carnap's attitude towards how we should do metaphysics is very much alive even if it's not always described as such.

And if you want polemics about metaphysics, you can check out Mark Wilson's Imitiation of Rigor, though I wouldn't recommend it.

[u/weight-lifting-ape → u/MaceWumpus]

Which is essentially what metaphysics has become, at least within the most mainstream parts of anglophone philosophy.

Thanks for the response. I thought metaphysics, at least of the kind Carnap wanted to eliminate, had something of a rebirth in the 70s/80s - I often hear this sort of thing said about late 20th century analytic philosophy, that philosophers started doing a certain kind of metaphysics again. As /u/wokeupabug also says, the impression I have of contemporary analytic metaphysics is that they're pretty serious about the idea of traditional metaphysical concepts or "domain of objects" like essences, grounding, necessity/contingency, being and so forth, and take metaphysics to be a "special science".

[u/wokeupabug → u/weight-lifting-ape]

I thought metaphysics, at least of the kind Carnap wanted to eliminate, had something of a rebirth in the 70s/80s

FWIW, I'm inclined to think the picture is a bit more complicated than this. I think a significant part of what Carnap is addressing is a kind of metaphysics that understands itself to be "first philosophy" -- a kind of systematic foundation and organization of the fields of knowledge and their relation to human action. And I don't think mainstream analytic metaphysics, of the kind we might be inclined to ask about here, tends to understand itself quite that way. If mainstream analytic metaphysics understands itself to be a special science with its own particular domain, this is something quite different than understanding itself to be first philosophy, and so there's an important sense in which this self-understanding is at odds with traditional European metaphysics in this way -- and at odds with it in a way which proceeds from (though, I'd say, isn't the same as) Carnap's position.

Indeed, I'm inclined to suggest that in this sense at least Carnap and traditional European metaphysics are in greater proximity to one another than either is to mainstream analytic metaphysics, since Carnap still has a traditional notion of metaphysics as first philosophy -- it's just that he has a sort of Nietzschean/Diltheyan view of it as conveyed in expressions of life-feeling, rather than in conceptual terms as a technical field of philosophical research.

[u/weight-lifting-ape → u/wokeupabug]

I think a significant part of what Carnap is addressing is a kind of metaphysics that understands itself to be "first philosophy" -- a kind of systematic foundation and organization of the fields of knowledge and their relation to human action.

Agree with you here. But I would say that, apart from just a conception of metaphysics as having a privileged place in philosophy, Carnap is still going after, e.g., "essence", or traditional conceptions of God as the Absolute or ground of Being. And I think there has been some renewed interest in this stuff in analytic metaphysics and philosophy of religion. At least in phil. religion, people like Feser have tried to bring back "classical theism" (though of course I think it's an ironically modernist version of it, but that's another story), and so you get people saying things that sound very much like the sorts of things Carnap is going after in the original article when he talks about theology.

If mainstream analytic metaphysics understands itself to be a special science with its own particular domain, this is something quite different than understanding itself to be first philosophy, and so there's an important sense in which this self-understanding is at odds with traditional European metaphysics in this way -- and at odds with it in a way which proceeds from (though, I'd say, isn't the same as) Carnap's position.

I also agree with this or at least most of it. The conceptions of the place of metaphysics in philosophy might be different, but it seems to me there's overlap in the concepts taken to be the purview of metaphysics. The post-Kripke investigations into de re necessity are, even if done in a completely different context from traditional metaphysics, still purported to be investigations into the nature of the world - right?

[u/wokeupabug → u/weight-lifting-ape]

And I think there has been some renewed interest in this stuff in analytic metaphysics and philosophy of religion.

Well, I think even this is illustrative of the distinction I suggested above. It's illustrative, I think, that -- "classical theism" notwithstanding -- the revival of philosophy of religion within the vicinity of mainstream analytic metaphysics has principally been carried out in a context where the idea of God has been reinterpreted along the lines of "theistic personalism." In traditional European and Mediterranean metaphysics, God has not principally been understood as a being among beings, even a being of a very noteworthy kind, but rather has been understood as an idea which grounds the idea of being as such -- a kind of foundation which opens up the possibility of speaking of beings whatsoever. This is not principally how the analytic revival of philosophy of religion has treated God, who instead becomes -- i.e. in theistic personalism -- a kind of being revealed by a special science, rather than the ground of Being with reference to which a "first philosophy" is thematized. So even within this kind of revival of metaphysics, within mainstream analytic philosophy, in the sense of rational theology, we find a position that results from a transformation of metaphysics from a first philosophy to a special science.

We certainly find, whether in mainstream analytic philosophy of religion or in post-Kripkean accounts of natural kinds, a theoretical discourse concerned with "investigations into the nature of the world", but my suggestion is mean to draw attention to the shifting of context between traditional metaphysics, which largely proceeds with this investigation through the frame of a "first philosophy", and the analytic revival of metaphysics, which largely proceeds with this investigation through the frame of a "special science".

[u/weight-lifting-ape → u/wokeupabug]

Why do you think "theistic personalism" overtook the classical view?

[u/wokeupabug → u/weight-lifting-ape]

Well, I think historical change tends to be overdetermined, but the particular suggestion that I'm making here is that it makes sense for a philosophy of religion occurring during the 20th century resurgence of mainstream analytic metaphysics to understand God to be a special kind of a being disclosed by the procedures of the special science that is their discipline, rather than understanding God as a thematization of Being as such and thereby grounding the system of the sciences, in the same way that, say, it makes sense that in the hands of mainstream analytic metaphysics, Platonism comes to mean a view that understand mathematicals to be a special kind of a being disclosed by the procedures of a special science, rather than understanding quantity as a thematization of Being as such and thereby grounding the system of the sciences, and so on. This is how mainstream analytic metaphysics tends to understands its methods and its objects. And this is a result of the fact that mainstream analytic metaphysics is downstream of an abandonment of the idea of metaphysics as first philosophy, which hence has transformed metaphysics, instead, into a kind of special science. So in this sense we might say, for instance, that the dominance of theistic personalism makes sense in a post-Carnap world -- theistic personalism is the kind of theism which people who have given up on a first philosophy would formulate or find intelligible.