2/28/22

Professor Lazerowitz's Structure of Metaphysics seeks to clarify the nature of Metaphysics, and justify its existence as an academic discipline. This latter point is in question due to the wide range of important matters about which metaphysicians cannot agree. He does this by discussing the major controversial Metaphysical topics such as: time, space, movement, the material world, universals, and logical necessity. The approach taken to this owes much to G E Moore, who he often quotes, however for much of the book he goes quite beyond Moore in developing his argument.
The opening chapter analyses "Moore's Paradox", which states that various philosophers have stated beliefs such as "time is unreal", or "physical objects exist only when perceived", but act in a way contrary to this in their daily lives. This chapter serves to bring to light the real peculiarity of metaphysics. This he resolves with the conclusion that when discussing things in a philosophical sense, different meanings are given to words than their everyday usage, and what this philosophy often amounts to is just a lingusitic novelty, in which the word is given a special usage. He makes clear the distinction between sentences which express an a priori statement, and those that express an empirical one, and concludes that the two domains must be dealt with appropriately and not confused with one another, to avoid metaphysical mistakes.
The next chapter then analyses and dismisses five philosophical views that have been held on what metaphysical theories amount to, for example that they are merely "nonsense, or "empirical", or "a priori". Then he presents a three-layered view of what metaphysical theories consist of. The first layer is either a theory, or an illusion of a theory about the nature or real existence of a phenomenon; the second layer is an a priori reasoning, which seeks to prove the contents of the first layer; the third layer is pyschological, and here the author refers to Freud's "unconscious". He suggests, quite believably, that what causes the philosopher to be attracted to the theory and increase his conviction, is often the way it appeals to the contents of his unconscious. This aspect of metaphysics is one which many metaphysicians would not consider, however it is not only applicable to them, but also to scientists, and is worth bearing in mind.
The rest of the book goes into further detail about other metaphysical issues, with whole chapters on logical necessity, universals, appearance and reality, the paradoxes of motion, and various other metaphysical topics.
What is important about this book is that it takes a measured and analytical approach to explaining why many of the metaphysical disagreements have come about, and suggesting alternative and logically sound approaches which avoid these issues. This aspect was clear and very well reasoned out, and definitely worth reading this book for if studying philosophy at university. He doesn't go as far as Wittgenstein, in proclaiming all metaphysics nonsense, and nor does he justify his arguments merely from the common sense argument, but he does reach well supported conclusions that come somewhere between the two.
The second important part of this book is the author's introduction of the psychology of the unconscious into the field metaphysics, however once his theory is introduced, relatively little of the rest of the book is spent in discussing it. For much of it, the reader is left to draw his own conclusions on this issue.
What disappointed me was that the author didn't go further in his discussion of his postulated pyschological tier of metaphysics. However, this did have the advantage of keeping the amount of speculation to a minimum, and what is here, in this modest book of 276 pages, is valuable and worth reading. I would very much recommend this book either to those widely read in the area, or as an introduction to metaphysics, however some prior experience with logic would would helpful. ( )