An Introduction to Metametaphysics

1. Why should you care about metametaphysics?; 1.1. Metametaphysics or metaontology?; 1.2. How to read this book; 1.3. Chapter outlines; 1.4. Further reading; 2. Quine vs Carnap: on what there is and what there isn't; 2.1. On what there is; 2.2. Plato's beard; 2.3. Enter Meinong; 2.4. External and internal questions; 2.5. Language pluralism; 3. Quantification and ontological commitment; 3.1. The meaning of the existential quantifier; 3.2. The existential quantifier and ontological commitment; 3.3. Quantifier variance and verbal debates; 3.4. More than existence questions; 4. Identifying the alternatives: ontological realism, deflationism, and conventionalism; 4.1. Ontological realism and anti-realism; 4.2. Ontological deflationism; 4.3. Towards extreme conventionalism; 4.4. A case study: Sider's ontological realism; 4.5. Taking stock; 5. Grounding and ontological dependence; 5.1. Ontological dependence: a fine-grained notion; 5.2. Identity-dependence and essential dependence; 5.3. Is grounding ontological dependence?; 5.4. Formal features of ground; 5.5. Grounding, causation, reduction, and modality; 5.6. Grounding and truthmaking; 6. Fundamentality and levels of reality; 6.1. The 'levels' metaphor; 6.2. Mereological fundamentality; 6.3. Further specifications: well-foundedness and dependence; 6.4. Generic ontological fundamentality; 6.5. Fundamentality and physics; 7. The epistemology of metaphysics: a priori or a posteriori?; 7.1. A priori vs a posteriori; 7.2. Modal rationalism and a priori methods; 7.3. The epistemology of essence; 7.4. Modal empiricism and the status of armchair methods; 7.5. Combining a priori and a posteriori methods; 8. Intuitions and thought experiments in metaphysics; 8.1. Specifying 'intuition'; 8.2. Intuitions and experimental philosophy; 8.3. Experience-based intuitions; 8.4. Rational intuition; 8.5. Scientific thought experiments; 8.6. Philosophical thought experiments; 9. Demarcating metaphysics and science: can metaphysics be naturalised?; 9.1. Autonomous metaphysics; 9.2. Fully naturalistic metaphysics; 9.3. The Principle of Naturalistic Closure and the primacy of physics; 9.4. Methodological similarities; 9.5. Moderately naturalistic metaphysics; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.