Metaphysics asks questions about existence: for example, do numbers really exist? Metametaphysics asks questions about metaphysics: for example, do its questions have determinate answers? If so, are these answers deep and important, or are they merely a matter of how we use words? What is the proper methodology for their resolution? These questions have received a heightened degree of attention lately with new varieties of ontological deflationism and pluralism challenging the kind of realism that has become orthodoxy in contemporary analytic metaphysics. This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline. It brings together many of the central figures in the debate with their most recent work on the semantics, epistemology, and methodology of metaphysics.

Table of Contents

• • 1 Introduction: A Guided Tour of Metametaphysics » David Manley     1
  • 2 Composition, Colocation, and Metaontology » Karen Bennett     38
  • 3 Ontological Anti-Realism » David J. Chalmers     77
  • 4 Carnap and Ontological Pluralism » Matti Eklund     130
  • 5 The Question of Ontology » Kit Fine     157
  • 6 The Metaontology of Abstraction » Bob Hale and Crispin      178
  • 7 Superficialism in Ontology » John Hawthorne     213
  • 8 Ontology and Alternative Languages » Eli Hirsch      231
  • 9 Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics » Thomas Hofweber      260
  • 10 Ways of Being » Kris McDaniel     290
  • 11 Metaphysics after Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks? » Huw Price     320
  • 12 On What Grounds What » Jonathan Schaffer     347
  • 13 Ontological Realism » Theodore Sider     384
  • 14 Ontology, Analyticity, and Meaning: the Quine-Carnap Dispute » Scott Soames     424
  • 15 Answerable and Unanswerable Questions » Annie L. Thomasson    444
  • 16 Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment » Peter van Imwagen     472
  • 17 Must Existence-Questions have Answers? » Stephen Yablo     507
  • Index 527