Category: Metaphilosophy

On Continental Philosophy: Response to a German Reader

This is an edited re-post (re-entry?) from 21 February 2017 to satisfy current interest. Against my better judgment, I am allowing comments.

………………………….

The following from a German sociologist (my comments are in blue):

Perhaps you know the old joke: Analytic philosophers think that continental philosophy is not sufficiently clear; continental philosophers think that analytic philosophy is not sufficient.

Having just reread the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, I don't see Kant as an analytic philosopher. Hegel and Nietzsche certainly belong to the continental tradition. And none of the philosophers of the 20th century, who really matter to me, can be called an analytic philosopher. Doesn't "analytic" simply mean after Wittgenstein and in his tradition? 

BV: As I see it, there was no analytic-Continental split before the 20th century. So classifying Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche in terms of that split is only marginally meaningful. But it is safe to say that Kant is more congenial to analytic philosophers than Hegel and Nietzsche are. 

When did the split come about and what is it about?

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger's 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap's 1932 response, "On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language."  In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics. And in fairness to Heidegger, we should note that he thinks he is doing something more radical than metaphysics. Metaphysics for Heidegger is  onto-theology.  Metaphysics thinks Being (das Sein) but always in reference to beings (das Seiende); it does not think Being in its difference from beings. The latter is Heidegger's project.

The following are widely regarded as Continental philosophers: Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Ortega y Gasset, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus. And of course there are others that are so regarded.

Note that the above are all Europeans.  But being European is not what makes them 'Continental.'  Otherwise Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap would have to be lumped in with them.  And of course there are Continental philosophers who do not hail from Europe. So what makes the above authors 'Continental' as opposed to 'analytic'?

It is not easy to say, which fact supplies a reason to not take too seriously talk of 'Continental' versus 'analytic.'

Note that all of the Continentals I mentioned  engage in analysis, some in very close, very careful  analysis.  (Ever read Husserl's Logical Investigations?)  And please don't say that they don't analyze language.  Ever read Brentano?  Gustav Bergmann accurately describes Brentano as "the first linguistic philosopher." (Realism, 234) Roderick Chisholm's paraphrastic approach was influenced significantly by Brentano. No  one would lump Chisholm in with the Continentals.

Will you say that the Continentals mentioned  didn't pay close attention to logic?  That's spectacularly false. Even for Heidegger!  Ever read his dissertation on psychologism in logic?

Perhaps you could say that the Continentals mentioned did not engage significantly with the ground-breaking work of Frege, widely regarded as the greatest logician since Aristotle. I think that would be true. But does this difference suffice to distinguish between Continental and analytic?  I don't think so: there are plenty of philosophers who write in a decidedly analytic style who do not engage with Frege, and some of them oppose Frege. Take Fred Sommers.  You wouldn't call him a Continental philosopher.  And while he engages the ideas of Frege, he vigorously opposes them in his very impressive attempt at resurrecting traditional formal logic.  And yet he would be classified as analytic.

A Matter of Style or of Substance?

According to Michael Dummett,

What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained.

[. . .]

On my characterisation, therefore, [Gareth] Evans was no longer an analytical philosopher.  He was, indeed, squarely in the analytical tradition: the three pillars on which his book [The Varieties of Reference, Oxford, 1982] rests are Russell, Moore and Frege. Yet it is only as belonging to the tradition — as adopting a certain philosophical style and as appealing to certain writers rather than to others — that he remains a member of the analytical school.  (Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1993)

For Dummett, then, what make a philosopher analytic is not the style in which he writes:  clear, precise, careful, explicitly logical with premises and inferences clearly specified, free of literary pretentiousness, name-dropping, rhetorical questions, and generally the sort of bullshitting that one finds in writers like John Caputo and Alain Badiou.  Nor is it the topics he writes about or the authorities he cites.  What makes the analytic philosopher are the twin axioms above mentioned.

The trouble with Dummett's criterion is that it is intolerably stipulative if what we are after is a more or less lexical definition of how 'analytic' and 'Continental' are actually used.  An approach that rules out Gareth Evans and Roderick Chisholm and Gustav Bergmann and Reinhardt Grossmann and so many others cuts no ice in my book. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

A Matter of Politics?

I don't think so. Look again at my list.  Sartre was a decided leftist, a Stalinist in his later phase.  And Camus was on the Left.  But everyone else on my list was either apolitical or on the Right.  Heidegger was a National Socialist. Latter-day Continentals, though, definitely slouch Leftward.

A Matter of Academic Politics?

This may be what the Continental versus analytic split comes down to more than anything else.  As Blaise Pascal says, with some exaggeration, "All men naturally hate one another."  To which I add, with some exaggeration: and are always looking for ways to maintain and increase the enmity.  If you are entranced with Heidegger you are going to hate the Carnapian analytic bigot who refuses to read Heidegger but mocks him anyway.  Especially when the bigot stands in the way of career success.  Although so many Continentals are slopheads, there is no asshole like an analytic asshole. That's been my experience.

A Matter of Religion?

No, there are both theists and atheists on my list.  And of course there are plenty of analytic philosophers who are theists. Most of them, however, are not.

A Matter of Attitude toward Science?

This has something to do with the split.  You can be a Continental philosopher and a traditional theist (von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al.) and you can be a Continental philosopher and a conservative (Ortega y Gasset), but is there any case of a Continental philosopher who is a logical positivist or who genuflects before the natural sciences in the scientistic manner?  I don't think so.  I am, however, open to correction.

Interim Conclusion

Talk of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy is not particularly useful.  It would be better to speak  of good and bad philosophy. But what are the marks of good philosophy?  That's a post for another occasion.

Back to my correspondent:

I see philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science. This is not saying that some arguments are not better than others or that one cannot distinguish different degrees of plausibility. But the overall conception (what Heidegger calls "Seinsverständnis) is more – and something essentially different – than the sum of of plausibilities or the logic consistency of the argumentation. There is, or so it appears to me, a 'channelling' of truth that resembles more the mystical experience than the scientific recognition. Of course I've read Wittgenstein, but why should I spend precious life time reading, say, Gilbert Ryle or Saul Kripke, when I can read Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik?

BV: As I am sure my reader knows, Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) has been dismissed as Begriffsdichtung, conceptual poetry.  So I am not surprised that he sees philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science.  His attitude is defensible: why read Kripke who is of interest only to specialists in logic and the philosophy of language and who has no influence on anything beyond those narrow precincts when you can read Hegel and come thereby to understand the dialectical thinking which, via Marx and Lenin, transformed the world?  

There is also the problem that the various attempts to bring philosophy onto the "sure path of science" (Kant) have all failed miserably despite the Herculean efforts of thinkers such as Edmund Husserl.  He attempted to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft, but he could not get even one of his brilliant students to follow him into his transcendental phenomenology.  (I don't consider Eugen Fink to be a counterexample.) There is no reason to think that philosophy will ever enter upon the sure path of science.   This is a reason to content oneself with the broader, looser, fuzzier approach of the Continentals.

Only if philosophy could be transformed into strenge Wissenschaft would we perhaps be justified in putting all our efforts into this project and eschewing the satisfaction of our needs for an overarching and spiritually satisfying Weltanschauung; we have no good reason to think philosophy will ever be so transformed; ergo, etc.

When [Theodor Wiesengrund]  Adorno was in Oxford, he wrote in a letter home: "Here it's always just about arguments." Most of his colleagues there did not even understand what he was missing. And that's the divide!

BV: That is indeed a good part of what the divide is all about. 

Well, of course this ignorance of the analytic tradition has in my case also to do with cultural nationalism. The philosophical departments here are more and more forgetting about the great German tradition. Thinkers like Hegel or Schelling, let alone Heidegger, are hardly taught anymore. I'm against this, I'm Deutsch and proud of it. Actually I want – and for me that's another reason to be against illegal immigration – Germany to become again a hotspot of art and philosophy!

BV:  I agree! When as a young man I spent a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, I was there to study Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger.  To my romantic young self Germany was, in the words of Heinrich Heine, das Land von Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and thinkers.  You Germans can be justifiably proud of your great tradition. Without a doubt, Kant belongs in the philosophical pantheon along with Plato and Aristotle. It is indeed a shame that the analysts are suppressing your great tradition.

As for illegal immigration, if looks from here as if Angela Merkel is a disaster for Germany. Language, borders, and culture are three things every nation has a right to protect and preserve.  There is nothing xenophobic or racist about it. 

Is Philosophy Justified in a Time of Crisis?

The country is unraveling, and you sit in your ivory tower pondering arcane questions about time and existence?  How is that a justifiable use of your time, energy, and brain power?

Here is my answer. Or rather one of them.

There have always been crises.  Human history is just one crisis after another.  The 20th Century was a doosy: two world wars, economic depression, the rise of unspeakably evil totalitarian states, genocide, the nuclear annihilation of whole cities, the Cold War that nearly led to World War III (remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962?), and then after the Evil Empire was quashed, the resurrection of radical Islam. I could go on.

Should we conclude that philosophy has never been justified?  But then science has never been justified and much of the rest of what we consider high culture.  For they have their origin in philosophy.

Perhaps you don't agree with my 'origins' claim.  Still, plenty in life is of value regardless  of its utility in mitigating whatever crisis happens to be in progress.  Or do you think Beethoven should have been a social worker?

And what makes you think that your activism will make a damned bit of difference?  The world is a mess; it always has been.  You are not going to change it. Live for what is beyond it. Strive for the Higher Things.

But the really fundamental error is to think that philosophy needs justification in terms of something external to it. I demolish this notion with the precision and trenchancy you have come to expect in Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities? 

How Could God be Justice itself?

David Gudeman writes; I reply:
 
George Berkeley was the first author who really shook my confidence in my existing world view. Before I read Berkeley, I had a Mr. Johnson-style contempt of physical idealism; after reading Berkeley, I realized that I had been naive–not because Berkeley was necessarily right, but because once I suppressed my presuppositions, I found him hard to refute, and came to realize how logically futile Mr. Johnson's refutation was.
Well, no one calls it 'physical idealism.' Stick with 'Berkeleyan idealism.' And of course it cannot be refuted ad lapidem, by kicking a stone.  Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects.  He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind. 
 
I offer this story as evidence of my good faith in the following, because I know I have irritated you before by bringing up topics like this, and very much do not want to do so again. In particular, I do have hopes that there is something to be found here if only I can come to grasp it.
 
With that, I'd like to ask you if you can explain what you mean by phrases like "God is the measure of Justice. God is Justice itself." (From this entry.)
 
To me this looks like a couple of category errors. God is a person, a measure of justice is a measure, and justice is a quality. How can these three be equated in any literal sense? [. . .]
Fair questions. 
 
A. I take it that you will grant me that God is a wholly just person.  Now assume the following: God is unique; there are non-divine persons; none of the latter are wholly just.  You and I are non-divine persons, and neither of us is wholly just, although one of us may be more just than the other.  There are degrees of justice in non-divine (created) persons. Now it makes sense to say that God sets the standard with respect to justice or being just.  God is the measure of justice in that he is just to the highest degree, and we fail to measure up, to different degrees.
 
It therefore makes sense to say that God, a person, is the standard, exemplar, measure of justice.  There is no category mistake.  The second alleged category mistake is harder to deal with, and a wholly satisfactory answer is not possible because when we discuss God, the ultimate source of all being, value, and intrinsic intelligibility, we are at the outer limit of intelligibility. (The Intelligent Source of all intrinsic intelligibility, because it is an Other Mind, cannot be understood with the clarity and completeness with which we understand ordinary objects among objects.) All I can hope to show is that the accusation of category mistake can be turned aside or rationally repelled. So here we go.
 
B. God is a just person, and he is just to the highest possible degree. Now is God just in virtue of instantiating a property of justice that exists independently of him?  You say justice is a quality. I'll play along. Is God just in virtue of instantiating this quality?  (Perhaps you are thinking of this quality as a necessarily existent 'abstract object.') If you say yes, then you compromise God's aseity, his from-himself-ness.  God is the Absolute. Not an absolute, but the Absolute.  As such, he cannot be dependent on anything external to himself for his existence or nature.   You will grant that God cannot have a cause of his existence external to himself. You must also grant that for God to be God he cannot be dependent on anything external to himself for his nature (essence).  So he can't be just in virtue of instantiating your quality, justice.  God sets the standard by being the standard: there is no standard of justice outside of God that he needs to conform to.
 
If so, if God is not an instance of justice, a just entity, then he must be (identically)  justice.  The Platonist Augustine drew this conclusion, one that entails the divine simplicity, and the Jansenists followed Augustine in this. God is like a self-exemplifying Platonic Form or paradigm.  Supreme Wisdom is itself wise; supreme Justice is itself just.  God is at once each of his attributes and also their unique instance.  God is, but he is not a being among beings.  God is (identically) Being itself, but not in a way the detracts from his being a being, or to be precise, the being.  For God to be God he must be unique in the highest possible sense: not one of a kind, not necessarily one of a kind, but necessarily such  that in him kind and instance are one.
 
The theist faces a dilemma.  Either God is or is not distinct from his attributes. if the former, then God is not God. If the latter, then God is beyond the comprehension of the discursive intellect.
 
(But is the second horn so bad? A God worth his salt must be transcendent, Transcendence itself. (Otherwise, your god is an idol. Whatever you say about Islam, it at least has a lively sense of the transcendence of God.)

In conclusion, Gudeman's second accusation of category error can be rationally resisted as I have just done.  One can cogently argue  up to the divine simplicity. The problem, however — and I freely admit it — is that the discursive intellect cannot wrap itself around  (cannot understand) how something can be ontologically simple. One is reduced to pointing beyond the discursive sphere.

 
Here we reach an impasse beyond which we cannot move by philosophical means. But what justifies the conceit that the only way to the ultimate truth is the philosophical way?

The Most Boring Philosophers

Nowadays philosophy so absorbs me in all its branches and movements that I find no philosopher boring. Indeed,  no subject is boring except to the bored who make it  so. Dry texts, like dry wines, are often delightfully subtle and simply require an educable and educated palate. Although no philosophers now bore me, here is a list of philosophers who bored me, or would have bored me, when I was one and twenty:

   1. G. E. Moore
   2. Elizabeth Anscombe
   3. Paul Ziff
   4. Norman Malcolm
   5. John Wisdom
   6. Roderick Chisholm

Philosophers who excited my 21-year-old self:

   1. Nicholas Berdyaev
   2. Miguel de Unamuno
   3. Karl Jaspers
   4. Friedrich Nietzsche
   5. Martin Heidegger
   6. Jean-Paul Sartre

Now imagine a philosophy department composed of the twelve aforementioned. Do you think it would split into two factions? What, if anything, do they have in common that justifies subsuming them under the rubric, philosophers?

I have become in many ways more analytic and less Continental over the years. I tend to think that this is a lot like becoming less liberal and more conservative, as these terms are popularly understood. One becomes more cautious, careful, precise, piece-meal, rigorous, attentive to details and differences and empirical data, less romantic, more patient, more logical, less impressionistic, less sanguine about big sweeping once-and-for-all solutions. . . .

In sum, and in a manner to elicit howls of protest:  In philosophy, the trajectory of maturation is from Continental to analytic.  In politics, from liberal to conservative.

Howl on, muchachos.

A Reader Poses a Question about the Extent of My Solubility Skepticism

M.M. writes,
I understand that your method is aporetic – you argue that the great problems of philosophy are genuine problems but also insoluble, at least by us here below. 
 
[. . .]
 
My question is: do you think that  — even if all positions in some metaphysical disputes have their problems — we can weight reasons for one position against other and make reasoned choice which is partially voluntaristic but also theoretically superior against other options? 
Yes.  Not all problems are insoluble; not all questions are unaswerable.   Let the question be: Are there beliefs?  Along comes an eliminativist who give the following argument:
 
(1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs. 
But any reasonable person should be able to see that this argument does not establish (4) but is instead more reasonably taken to be a reductio ad absurdum of premise (1) according to which beliefs are nothing if not brain states.  For if anything is obvious, it is that there are beliefs.  This is a pre-theoretical datum, a given.  What they are is up for grabs, but that they are is a starting point that cannot be denied except by those in the grip of  a scientistic  ideology.  Since the argument is valid in point of logical form, and the conclusion is manifestly false, what the argument shows is that beliefs cannot be brain states. (I am assuming that we accept both (2) and (3).)
 
I conclude that not all problems are such that the arguments pro et contra cancel out so as to leave an intellectually honest person in a state of doxastic equipoise.  I hold that this is the case only for a set of core problems, the great problems as my reader calls them, the problems that have humbled the greatest minds.
 
Contrast the question of the existence of beliefs with the question of the existence of God. Deny beliefs and I show you the door. Deny God, and I listen attentively to your arguments.

Continuing the Discussion of Time, Tense, and Existence

This just in from London.  I've intercalated my responses.

Here is another take. We agree on our disagreement about the following consequence

(A)  X is no longer temporally present, therefore X has ceased to exist.

You think it is not valid, i.e. you think the antecedent could be true with the consequent false. I think it is valid.

BV: Yes. So far, so good. 

However regarding

          (B) X is no longer temporally present, therefore X does not still exist

we seem to agree. We both think the antecedent cannot be true with the consequent false.

BV:  Right.  For example, we agree BOTH that the Berlin Wall is no longer temporally present (and is therefore temporally past) AND that the Berlin Wall does not still exist.  I should think that we also, as competent speakers of English, agree that locutions of the form 'X still exists' are intersubstitutable both salva veritate and salva significatione with locutions of the form 'X existed and X exists' where all of the verbs are tensed and none are tense-neutral or tenseless. Agree?  My second comment has no philosophical implications.  It is merely a comment on the meaning/use of a stock English locution.

My puzzle is that my reading, and I think a natural reading, is that (A) and (B) mean the same, because “X has ceased to exist” and “X does not still exist” mean the same. You clearly disagree.

BV:  If we stick to tensed language, then 'X has ceased to exist' and 'X does not still exist' mean the same.  So I don't disagree if we adhere to tensed language. But note that 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as between

a) X has ceased to presently-exist (or present-tensedly exist)

and

b) X has ceased to be anything at all (and thus has become nothing at all).

For example, the Berlin Wall has ceased to presently-exist.  But it doesn't follow that said wall has become nothing, that it is no longer a member of the totality of entities, that it has been annihilated by the mere passage of time.  If you think that it is no longer a member of said totality, then you are assuming presentism and begging the question against me.  You have restricted the totality of what exists to what presently exists. Note that I do not deny that one can move validly from the premise of (A) to its conclusion if one invokes presentism as an auxiliary premise. My claim is that the inference fails as a direct or immediate inference.

I think you want to argue that there is a covert tensing in “X does not still exist” which is absent in “X has ceased to exist”, which (according to you) is tenseless. But how? Doesn’t the verb ‘cease’ always imply a time at which X ceased to exist? Would it make sense to say that 2+2 has ceased to equal 4? How?

BV: In 'X does not still exist,' 'exist' is present-tensed.  But 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as explained above . It can be read your tensed way, but it can also be read in my tenseless way.  Surely you don't want to say that 'exists' has exactly the same meaning /sense as 'exists-now' or 'exists' (present tense).  We could call that semantic presentism. I don't think anyone is a semantic presentist.  And for good reason. You, as a nominalist, will not countenance abstracta such as numbers and sets and the other denizens of the Platonic menagerie. But you understand what you are opposing when you oppose their admission into our ontology in the Quinean sense (our catalog by category of what there is).  And so you understand the notion of tenseless existence and tenseless property possession as when a 'Platonist' says that 7 is prime. The copula is tenseless, not present-tensed.

So, in summary, my problem (and I am always seeing problems) is how you think (A) and (B) differ.

Over to you.

BV: The Boston Blizzard of '78 was one hell of a storm. When it ended, did it cease to exist? Yes of course, if we are using 'exist' in the ordinary present-tensed way. The storm because wholly past, and in becoming wholly past it stopped being presently existent. Obviously, nothing can exist at present if it is wholly past.  And it is quite clear that what no longer is present is not still present, and that what no longer presently exists is not still presently existent.

So far, nothing but platitudes of ordinary usage.  Nothing metaphysical. 

We venture into metaphysics when we ask: Does it follow straightaway from the storm's having become wholly temporally past, that it is nothing at all?  I say No. If you say Yes, then you are endorsing presentism, a controversial metaphysical theory. 

You can avoid controversy if you stick to ordinary language.  If you have trouble doing this, Wittgensteinian therapy may be helpful.

Problemverlust

The following remark in Wittgenstein's Zettel seems to fit certain ostriches of my acquaintance.

456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called "loss of problems." (Problemverlust) Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world become broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.

Metaphysical Explanation Again

One question I am discussing with Micheal Lacey is whether any sense can be attached to the notion of metaphysical explanation. I answer in the affirmative. Perhaps he can tell me whether he agrees with the following, and if not, then why not.

Tom is a tomato of my acquaintance. The predicate 'red' is true of Tom. Equivalently, 'Tom is  red' is true.  Now the sentence just mentioned is contingently true. (It is obviously not necessarily true in any of the ways a sentence, or the proposition it expresses, could be necessarily true. For example, it is not true ex vi terminorum.)  

Now ask: could a contingently true sentence such as 'Tom is red' just be true?  "Look man, the sentence is just true; that is all that can be said, what more do you want?"  This response is no good. It cannot be a brute fact that our sample sentence is true.  By 'brute fact' I mean a fact that neither has nor needs an explanation.  So the fact that 'Tom is red' is true needs an explanation.  And since the fact is not self-explanatory, the explanation must invoke something external to the sentence.

This strikes me as a non-negotiable datum, especially if we confine our attention to present-tensed contingently true sentences.

I hope it is clear that what is wanted is not a causal explanation of why a particular tomato is red as opposed to green. Such an explanation would make mention of such factors as exposure to light, temperature, etc.  What is wanted is not a causal explanation of Tom's being ripe and red as opposed to unripe and green, but an explanation of a sentential/propositional representation's being actually true as opposed to possibly true.  The question, then, is this: WHAT MAKES A CONTINGENTLY TRUE PRESENT-TENSED SENTENCE/PROPOSITION TRUE?

Our contingently true sentence is about something, something in particular, namely Tom, and not about Tim. And what the sentence is about is not part of the sentence or the (Fregean) proposition it expresses.  It is external to both, not internal to either.  And it is not an item in the speaker's mind either.  Tom, then, is in the extralinguistic and extramental world.  Now I will assume, pace Meinong, that everything exists, that there are no nonexistent items.  Given that assumption I say: VERITAS SEQUITUR ESSE (VSE).  Truth follows being. Truth supervenes on being if we are talking about contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearers.

That is to say: every contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearer has need of at least one thing in the extralinguistic world for its truth.  Thus 'Tom is red' cannot be true unless there is at least one thing external to the sentence on which its truth depends. What I have just said lays down a necessary condition for a contingent sentence's being true.

But VSE is not sufficient for an adequate explanation of the truth of 'Tom is red.'  If Tom alone was all one needed for the explanation, then we wouldn't be able to account for the difference between the true 'Tom is red' and the false 'Tom is green.'  In short, the truth-maker must have a proposition-like structure, but without being a proposition. The truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is not Tom, not is it any proposition; the truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is the state of affairs, Tom's being red.  (I am sketching the Armstrong line; there are other ways to go.)

The state of affairs Tom's being red is the ontological ground of the truth of the corresponding sentence/proposition.  It is not a logical ground because it is not a proposition.  Nor is it a cause.  

It seems to me that I have just attached a tolerably clear sense to the notion of a metaphysical explanation. I have explained the truth of the sentence 'Tom is red' by invoking the state of affairs, Tom's being red.  The explanation is not causal, nor is it logical. And so we can call it metaphysical or ontological.

Have I convinced you, Micheal?

Is There Such a Thing as Metaphysical Explanation?

M. L. writes,
 
I've been enjoying your critique of [Peter] van Inwagen. [The reader is presumably referring to  my "Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method" in Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, 2015, vol. 12, no. 2, 99-125]  I was initially astonished at his claim that metaphysics/ontology doesn't explain, but it also got me curious about where the explanation is going on in ontological accounts (especially of properties, however construed).
 
I'm doing a Ph.D. in metaontology and I'm contrasting neo-Quinean (van Inwagen) and neo-Aristotelian (Lowe) approaches. 
 
Can you direct me to where you might have written about, if indeed you have, how it is ontology/metaphysics explains?
 
Well, I haven't discussed the issue head-on in a separate publication, but I have discussed it en passant in various contexts. Below is a re-do of a 2012 weblog entry that addresses the question and may spark discussion. Combox open.
 
………………………
 

Let 'Tom' name a particular tomato.  Let us agree that if a predicate applies to a particular, then the predicate is true of the particular.  Predicates are linguistic items.  Tomatoes are not. If Tom is red, then 'red' is true of Tom, and if 'red' is true of Tom, then Tom is red. This yields the material biconditional

1. Tom is red iff 'red' is true of Tom.

Now it seems to me that the following question is intelligible:  Is Tom red because 'red' is true of Tom, or is 'red' true of Tom because Tom is red?  'Because' here does not have a causal sense.  So the question is not whether Tom's being red causes 'red' to be true of Tom, or vice versa.  So I won't speak of causation in this context.  I will speak of metaphysical/ontological grounding.  The question then is what grounds what, not what causes what.   Does Tom's being red ground the application (the being-applied)  of 'red' to Tom, or does the application (the being-applied) of 'red' to Tom ground Tom's being red?

I am not primarily concerned with the correct answer to this question, but with meaningfulness/intelligibility of the question itself.

Grounding is asymmetrical: if x grounds y, then y does not ground x.  (It is also irreflexive and transitive.)  Now if there is such a relation as grounding, then there will be a distinctive form of explanation we can call metaphysical/ontological explanation.  (Grounding, even though it is not causation, is analogous to causation, and metaphysical explanation, even though distinct from causal explanation, is analogous to causal explanation.)

Explaining is something we do: in worlds without minds there is no explaining and there are no explanations, including metaphysical explanations.  But I assume that, if there are any metaphysical grounding relations, then  in every world metaphysical grounding relations obtain.  (Of course, there is no grounding of the application of predicates in a world without languages and predicates, but there are other grounding relations. For example, if propositions are abstract objects that necessarily exist, and some of the true ones need truth-makers, then truth-making, which is a grounding relation, exists in worlds in which there are no minds and no languages and hence no sentences.)

Grounding is not causation. It is not a relation between event tokens such as Jack's touching a live wire and Jack's death by electrocution.  Grounding is also not a relation between propositions.  It is not a logical relation that connects propositions to propositions.  It is not the relation of material implication, nor is it entailment (the necessitation of material implication), nor any other logical relation wholly situated at the level of propositions.  Propositions, let us assume, are the primary truth-bearers. 

In our example, grounding is not a relation between propositions — it is not a logical relation — since neither Tom nor 'red' are propositions. 

I want to say the following.  Tom's being red grounds the correctness of the application of 'red' to Tom.  'Red' is true of Tom because (metaphysically, not causally or logically) Tom is red, and not vice versa.  'Red' is true of Tom in virtue of  Tom's being red.  Tom's being red is metaphysically prior to the truth of 'Tom is red' where this metaphysical priority cannot be reduced to some ordinary type of priority, whether logical, causal, temporal, or what have you.  Tom's being red metaphysically accounts for the truth of 'Tom is red.' Tom's being red makes it the case the 'red' is true of Tom.  Tom's being red makes 'Tom is red' true.  

I conclude that there is at least one type of metaphysical grounding relation, and at least one form of irreducibly metaphysical explanation. 

We can ask similar questions with respect to normative properties.  Suppose Jesus commands us to love one another.  We distinguish among the commander, the act of commanding, the content of the command, and the normative property of the commanded content, in this case the obligatoriness of loving one another.  If Jesus is God, then whatever he commands is morally obligatory. Nevertheless, we can intelligibly ask whether the content is obligatory because Jesus/God commands it, or whether he (rightly) commands it because it is obligatory.  The 'because' here is neither causal not logical.  It is metaphysical/ontological.
 
This of course a variation on the old Euthyphro Dilemma in the eponymous Platonic dialog.
 
I freely admit that there is something obscure about a grounding relation that is neither causal nor logical. But of course logical and causal relations too are problematic when subjected to squinty-eyed scrutiny. 
 
I conclude with a dogmatic slogan. Metaphysics without metaphysical explanation is not metaphysics at all.  

Could it be Reasonable to Affirm the Infirmity of Reason?

Any reasons one adduces in support of the thesis of  the infirmity of reason will share in the weakness of the faculty whose weakness is being affirmed.  Is this a problem for the proponent of the thesis? Does he contradict himself? Not obviously: he might simply accept the conclusion that the reasoning in support of the thesis is inconclusive.

Suppose I argue that, with respect to all substantive philosophical theses, there there are good arguments  pro and good arguments contra, and that these arguments 'cancel out.'  Now my thesis is substantive, and so my thesis applies to itself, whence it follows that my meta-thesis has both good arguments for it and good arguments against it, and that they cancel out.

Where is the problem? I am simply applying my meta-philosophical skepticism to itself, as I must if I am to be logically consistent.  Now I could make an exception for my meta-thesis, but that, I think, would be intolerably ad hoc.

I am not dogmatically affirming the infirmity of reason; I am merely stating that there are reasons to accept it, reasons that are not conclusive.

Deeper into this topic:

Seriously Philosophical Theses and Argument Cancellation

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre: The Infirmity of Reason

The Spirit of Philosophy

By my lights, the spirit of genuine philosophy is anti-dogmatic.  A real philosopher does not bluster. He does not claim to know what he does not know, and in some cases, cannot know. A real philosopher does not confuse subjective conviction with objective certainty. He has time and he takes time. He can tolerate suspense and open questions. But his suspension is not a Pyrrhonian abandonment of inquiry, but is in the service of it. His happiness is not a porcine ataraxia, but the happiness of the hunt. Unlike the dogmatist, however, he has high standards with the result that is hunt is long and perhaps endless as long as he remains in statu viae wandering among the charms and horrors of the sublunary.

And yet we are participants in life's parade and not mere spectators of it. Curiously, we are both part of the passing scene and observers of it.  To us as participants in the flux and shove of the real order a certain amount of bluster has proven to be life-enhancing and practically necessary. To live is to maneuver, to position oneself, to take a position, to adopt a stance, to grab one's piece of the action and defend it, and in the clinch to shoot first and philosophize later.

As so we are torn. It is a broken world and we are broken on its samsaric wheel. To put it grandly,  the human condition is a tragic predicament. We must act in conditions of poor lighting, maintaining ourselves in the Cave's chiaroscuro, with little more than faith and hope to keep us going. At the same time we seek light, light, more light and the transformation of faith into knowledge and hope into having. 

No Total Clarity in Philosophy

To demand total clarity in philosophy is like demanding that one's visual field be all focus and no fringe.  It is a demand  that cannot be satisfied.  But the situation in philosophy is worse than the metaphor suggests. The visual fringe can be brought into focus if one is willing to allow the focus to become fringe. The transdiscursive, however, to which philosophy is beholden and to which she points, can never be brought into discursive focus. The transdiscursive, ineliminably obscure, must forever remain fringe. 

The unity of the proposition, for example, without which no proposition can attract a truth value, and without which no proposition can be more than a truth-value-less aggregate of its sub-propositional parts, lies beyond the grasp of the discursive intellect.

Might we reasonably expect total clarity in the next world? The next world might be samsara 2.0, clearer, brighter, more intelligible, but still subject to the duality: clarity-obscurity. Ascend from the Cave, and you will still experience light and darkness, but more light and less darkness than down below. And beyond that there perhaps lies samsara 3.0, and so on.  Ever subtler realms of chiaroscuro. The nirvanic terminal state would then be the extinction of all dualities, and the unspeakable unity of clarity and obscurity, intelligibility and ab-surdity.  Could that be the ultimate Goal? Could the ens reallissimum himself take as his final goal, nibbanic extinction? 

Could the ens perfectissimum et necessarium say to himself: Take it to the limit Old Man and become finally in truth what you were supposed to be all along, Absolute and Unconditioned?

The above is a species of nonsense from the point of view of the discursive intellect.  Important nonsense or nugatory nonsense?  If you plump for the latter, are you not assuming that the discursive intellect is unconditioned?

Companion post: The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason.