Language and Metaphysics

Abstract

Recent attempts to reduce metaphysics to the language in which it is expressed, and in this way to make the metaphysics vanish, call for a reexamination of both language and metaphysics as well as of the relations between them. We need a linguistic examination of metaphysics and a metaphysical examination of language, as well as separate studies of each in order to determine its fitness for interpreting the other. The linguistic examination of metaphysics is being accomplished — disastrously for metaphysics — by the linguistic analysts of the British school, the followers of Wittgenstein’s second published book. Other and more constructive ways of conducting the same examination must surely exist. But in the meanwhile the metaphysical examination of language awaits adequate interpretation, and it is to this task that the present effort is addressed.