Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics

A number of important philosophical problems are closely connected to questions in ontology. For example, to make progress in the philosophy of arithmetic, one needs to come to terms with whether there are natural numbers, whether such things exist. To make progress on these problems, one also needs to make progress on the ontological questions they are connected to. However, ontology is rather puzzling as a philosophical discipline. It is unclear why the question whether there are natural numbers is a philosophical question at all, in part since an answer is immediately implied by the results of mathematics. And it is unclear why the question can’t be answered completely trivially in the affirmative with simple arguments like this: Jupiter has four moons, so the number of moons of Jupiter is four, so there are numbers. Furthermore, it is unclear what hangs on the ontological question turning out one way or the other. In this book, I hoped to make progress on a series of philosophical problems that are tied to ontological questions by focusing first on ontology itself: what questions it should aim to answer, how it should answer them and whether these answers are properly given in philosophy or elsewhere. This issue is closely tied to what ambitions metaphysics can reasonably be taken to have for contributing to inquiry in general. Are there are questions of fact that are properly addressed in metaphysics and not to be answered elsewhere, in particular the sciences? Do such questions have a reasonable degree of autonomy from the sciences? And if so, what might these questions be and how do they relate to those asked in other parts of inquiry?