Reason and Metaphysics

After a short historical overview of the relationships between reason and metaphysics, the paper criticizes a popular idea according to which metaphysics, widely conceived, consists of two parts: an account of what there is, often called “ontology”, and an account of what it is, often called “metaphysics” in a narrow sense. It is argued that metaphysics begins when one wonders how to bring unity, order and coherence to a chaotic congeries of existential commitments coming from common sense and sciences (not from metaphysics itself). The task is accomplished by saying (prescriptively, not descriptively) what the entities we are pre-metaphysically committed necessarily are, which classifies them into a limited number of highest ontological categories (metaphysics can deny their existence only if they are such that they could not exist or coexist with others, which explains the rather limited role that experience plays in metaphysics). So conceived, metaphysics has much to do with systematization, where the epistemic dynamic of systematization is much more coherentist than foundationalist.