In Defence of ‘In Defence of Modesty’, and Against the Primacy of Metaphysics

Abstract Metaphysics is the science of what is as such. And what is is the formal object of thought; it is what is thought as such. Hence metaphysics, the science of being, is the self-clarification of thought. The original moment of metaphysics is Parmenides’ pronouncement that being and thinking are the same: ‘τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι’. The moment is recaptured when Hegel writes that, in the idea of being, thought embraces itself in its absolute abstraction. So this is the concern of metaphysics: thinking and being. That concern was central to a certain tradition of analytic philosophy, originating in Frege and Wittgenstein. Thus books belonging in this tradition bear titles like Word and Object, Mind and World . A late book in this tradition is Peacocke’s The Primacy of Metaphysics . It opposes itself to McDowell’s Mind and World and Dummett’s ‘What is a Theory of Meaning?’ In what follows I want to discuss that opposition. I shall do so in a way that, I hope, will show a reader of Hegel that it may be fruitful, in one’s attempts to think about thinking and being, to engage the said analytic tradition. In this qualified way, my contribution will bring today’s metaphysics into communication with Hegel’s philosophy, revealing, hopefully, the relevance of the former.