A Modest Defence of Philosophical Respectability

Abstract

I agree with the great majority of what Philip Kitcher has written about the relations between science, philosophy and politics. In this paper, however, I suggest a slightly different boundary from that which Kitcher draws between useful philosophy and respectable but useless philosophy. Specifically, I want to defend the importance of a perhaps unlikely part of respectable philosophy, metaphysics. There are metaphysical possibilities beyond the ultra-realism that Kitcher rightly excoriates, and I try to show that a broad metaphysical thesis I support, process ontology or processualism, has real significance for our empirical investigation of the natural world and even for the possibility of a progressive politics. I also propose a dialectical relation between metaphysics and the philosophy of science.