Philosophy has confidently resumed debating the nature of ultimate reality, treating metaphysics like just another science and dismissing old positivistic fears that its claims are meaningless. But this confidence is unearned, argues philosopher Nicholas Stang, since, as Kant showed, we lack any good explanation of how language can refer to such an ultimate reality. It’s time metaphysics stopped trying to describe a world that lies somewhere out there, utterly other than and outside of our minds. Instead, a more promising approach lies in the German Idealist idea that mind and reality are in some way co-constitutive.

Metaphysics talks about the ultimate nature of reality—not how we know about the world, nor how we ought to act or live in it, but how the world itself is. Metaphysics aims to peer behind the way things appear in ordinary experience, or even our best scientific theories, and ask: is that how things really are? The world seems to contain a bunch of different, separate entities—rocks and rivers, tables and chairs, bushes and trees, particles and fields—but is this true, or is there in reality only one single thing? Ordinarily we assume that complex material objects, our houses, cars, and coffee tables, are real—but is this true, or are only their simplest parts real? On the other side, is the whole universe of which they are parts the only “real” thing? Physics tells us that the universe is a vast spacetime that is home to physical forces—but is this true, or is spacetime itself founded on something non-physical, like minds? Or a single mind—or God? These questions are questions of metaphysics.

For several decades, analytic philosophers, under the influence of logical positivists like Rudolf Carnap, rejected these questions as meaningless. The positivists held that every meaningful question could be answered either empirically, or else through logical analysis of the meaning of our terms. But the questions of metaphysics do not fit into either category. They are not empirical in any straightforward sense; the latest results from CERN are not going to settle whether reality is ultimately physical, or whether it depends on something mental, or even on something that is neither mental nor physical. But these questions are not conceptual or logical, either. We can define our terms as rigorously as we please; this alone will not settle whether reality is ultimately mental or physical (or neither or both), or whether the way things actually are is the only way they possibly could have been. Logical analysis of concepts will not settle the questions of metaphysics.

Having rejected the logical positivist criterion of meaningfulness (that every meaningful claim is answerable empirically or through logical analysis), analytic philosophers have returned in recent decades to metaphysics, and metaphysics has enjoyed a splendid resurgence. Questions and debates that would have been familiar to any eighteenth-century metaphysician—whether reality is ultimately physical or mental, whether there are many things or only one “big” thing, whether complex material objects are real, whether other “possible worlds” exist, whether everything in reality has a complete explanation—are back on the table,  and pursued with the characteristic rigor and precision of analytic philosophy. We appear to be living in a golden age of metaphysics.

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The mere fact that the methodology of contemporary metaphysics is modeled on the methodology of natural science should give us no confidence that we are obtaining, or even approaching, knowledge of the truth about ultimate reality.

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