Metaphysics has been criticised as unscientific, speculative, and redundant. But any critic of metaphysics inevitably ends up making metaphysical claims of their own. Metaphysics is in fact inescapable – all of our thinking is underpinned by it, and those who ignore it simply espouse an unexamined and possibly faulty metaphysics, argues Robert Stern.

This is the seventh instalment in our series The Return of Metaphysics, in partnership with the Essentia Foundation.

Read the series' previous articles The Return of Metaphysics: Hegel vs Kant, The Return of Idealism: Hegel vs Russell,  Derrida and the trouble with metaphysics, The Return of Metaphysics: Russell and Realism, After Metaphysics: Rorty and American Pragmatism, and Wittgenstein was a Metaphysician.

In slipping from the glory days of being treated as first philosophy, to the role of mere handmaid of science, to more recently being dismissed as meaningless verbiage, the once proud discipline of metaphysics might seem to be in terminal decline. While its aim is to tell us about the fundamental nature of reality, it is now commonly accused of relying on conceptions of the world and on methods of inquiry that have been surpassed, and that although once some confidence in it may have been warranted, this cannot be the case today. For example, we can no longer share the belief in a universe ordered by a rational and benevolent deity that may formerly have underpinned the kind of rationalist metaphysical theorizing of a Leibniz. It may therefore seem inevitable that metaphysics is a part of philosophy that we must now give up.