The Rescher Prize goes to Kit Fine: why has metaphysics come back?

Logical positivism's boldest slogan was directed against metaphysics: sentences about being as such cannot be verified, and are therefore meaningless.

By the middle of the twentieth century this was very nearly the common view. Today metaphysics is one of the liveliest areas of analytic philosophy.

Kit Fine is among the figures at the centre of that reversal. The American Philosophical Association has selected him to give the 2027 Nicholas Rescher Prize Lecture.

Professor of philosophy and mathematics at New York University, Fine works in metaphysics, philosophical logic and the philosophy of language. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.

The rule governing the Rescher Prize is what gives the choice its point: the lecture must address a topic in systematic metaphysics, broadly construed, and must speak to a wide philosophical readership. The prize, in other words, rewards not technical accomplishment but the ambition to build a system.

Fine's move: from “what there is” to “what it is”#

To understand Fine's metaphysics one has first to clear away a common misconception.

Metaphysics is usually identified with a single question: what is there in the world? Are there numbers, are there possible worlds, are there parts as distinct from the wholes they compose?

Fine finds that framing inadequate. The real philosophical work, on his view, is not to count what exists but to explain the fundamental relations between the things that do.

A famous example of his shows the difference. Socrates and the singleton set containing Socrates — {Socrates} — cannot be pulled apart: if one exists, so, necessarily, does the other. Classical modal logic treats the two symmetrically.

But our intuition is not symmetrical. The essence of the set depends on Socrates; the essence of Socrates does not depend on the set. In saying what Socrates is we need mention no set at all; in saying what the set is we must mention Socrates.

Fine's paper of 1994, “Essence and Modality”, starts from exactly this point and draws a consequential conclusion: essence cannot be defined in terms of modality. Necessity derives from essence, not the other way round.

This was the reopening, with the tools of modern logic, of an argument that has run since Aristotle.

Grounding: philosophy's new verb#

Fine's name is today most often linked with the notion of grounding — rendered in Turkish as temellendirme, or as the relation of ontological explanation.

The thought is this. There is a connective we use constantly in philosophy without ever analysing it: “in virtue of”, “because”, “what makes it so”.

An action is good because it reduces suffering. A sentence is true because the world is a certain way. A mental state exists because something is going on in the brain.

This “because” is neither causation nor logical entailment. It is a relation in its own right, and for Fine it is metaphysics's proper subject: what makes what the case.

The gain the concept brings is that instead of sterile questions of the form “does X really exist?”, one can ask “in virtue of what does X exist?”. Are moral facts grounded in natural facts? Are social facts grounded in facts about individuals? These questions are now the main business of analytic metaphysics.

Fine has also done foundational work in mereology, the study of the part-whole relation.

Why did it come back?#

There are three reasons for the return of metaphysics.

The first is technical. With Kripke's Naming and Necessity in the 1970s, modal logic came of age and it became possible to speak precisely about necessity. Most of the sentences the positivists called meaningless had merely looked blurred for want of instruments.

The second is scientific. Quantum mechanics, cosmology and neuroscience throw up questions they cannot answer on their own. Can a whole be reduced to its parts? Does time pass, or is it merely a dimension? The quantum session at Bilkent PhilFest, which we covered in this column this month, stands at the same crossing point.

The third is our tacit assumptions. Beneath our everyday and scientific talk lie metaphysical commitments we do not notice. The value of Fine's work is that it makes those commitments visible.

Two kinds of philosopher#

Some thinkers in the history of philosophy ask new questions; others rebuild old ones.

Fine belongs to the second kind. The questions he asks — what is essence, what makes what, how does a part relate to a whole — have been asked since Aristotle.

What is different is that he reconstructs them with the precision of modern logic. And in reconstructing them, he has brought back a field that an age had discredited.

This is what makes the Rescher Prize's requirement of “systematic metaphysics” meaningful: the prize rewards not clever answers to piecemeal problems but the effort to build a whole.

In Turkish#

Fine's work has not been translated into Turkish. The debate over grounding is followed in Turkey largely through the analytic philosophy journals — we traced that line in our file on Öncül Analitik Felsefe.