Putting Metaphysics First: Essays on Metaphysics and Epistemology, by Michael Devitt

Michael Devitt’s recent book Putting Metaphysics First collects together fifteen of his previously published articles on metaphysics and epistemology. I will first explain the basic crux of these articles, then give high praise for the volume, and finally raise a concern about his way of distinguishing antirealist views from realism in a given domain. The first chapter argues against David Armstrong’s realism about universals. It first explains why the One over Many argument is a pseudo-problem. Besides a basic story about how a given predicate ‘F’ can apply to many F things, no further explanation is needed for why objects a and b are F, and therefore no universals are needed to do explanatory work. Devitt then argues that, if there are any problems for the nominalists in this ballpark, these have to do with the need to provide translations of our talk about the properties of properties to a language that does not require the existence of universals.