Agents, Causes, and Explanations: The Idea of a Metaphysical System

Abstract

This is a paper about causality and explanation, specifically it is about the relation between the ideas of causality and agency, and about the connection between causality and the problems of properties, events, continuing states of affairs, and substances. But its real purpose is to expose some issues about the nature of metaphysics. Metaphysics, as McTaggart insisted, is about the ultimate nature of reality. If that is so, the task of the metaphysician is to deal with the whole, for one could not tell what was ultimate if one did not know what there was. Metaphysics is thus about what there is in the sense of what counts, finally, as being, or, if being is somehow a derivative notion, then it must be about what being is derived from. There is a sense in which Quine is right: There is one ontological question: What is there? And there is one answer: THE NATURE OF METAPHYSICS