Road To A Metaphysic

A major purpose of this blog is to share "how it's done". Here's how my metaphysic came about (see the previous post). In June 2008, I holed up in the country one bitterly cold winter, and began intensive preparations for a paper. I finally wrote it in September 2009. Titled On Denotation, it explored Aristotle's views on language. Before I sent it anywhere, I had it checked by a number of postgraduate students. This paper was declined by three major journals, yet with praise. Then in January 2012, I decided to abandon conventions (journals tend to have a lot of them), and wrote the paper my way. The same month, I submitted it to The Philosopher, now under a new title Revisiting Aristotle's Noun. It was accepted a year later, subject to a rewrite of the introduction. In the new introduction, I suggested that Aristotle's views “might have profound implications for life in modern society”. Editor Martin Cohen replaced “might” with “do”, and the paper was published in March 2013. Through a series of essays on The Philosopher's sister site Philosophical Investigations, I explored these “profound implications” in a variety of ways, until a constellation of essays had come into being. Some of them attracted a lot of attention (and still do). The idea of a metaphysic was raised, and in September 2014, editors Martin Cohen and Perig (Pierre-Alain) Gouanvic created a public, on-line space for me to develop the project.  This provided the impetus and encouragement without which the work might have languished. The editors joked that a metaphysic would take a thousand years. In fact it took six months, in three phases. In the first and most intensive phase, the conceptual content was created, working to deadlines. An early objective was to establish whether it could work at all, conceptually. We sensed that it could. A second and faster phase, also completed to deadlines, meant improving on conceptual clarity, and readability. A third and final phase, without deadlines and with editorial oversight, saw the completion and publication of the project, in March 2015. Pages in The Philosopher describe the long-term development of the metaphysic. OBSERVATION: I took the photo while "holed up" in 2008.