The Metaphysics of Perspectives:
On time, possibility, and the self.
(coming soon)
Subjectivity, temporal passage, and metaphysical contingency appear at first glance to be three distinct and largely independent phenomena — each inspiring its own realm of questions, intuitions, theories, and debates. But a deeper look at these three phenomena, particularly at the metaphysical issues that arise in the attempt to provide a satisfying account for them, reveals deep structural parallels between the three associated realms of metaphysical inquiry. In this book, I uncover the depth of the structural parallels between these domains, and examine the metaphysical and meta-metaphysical implications of this shared structure. I argue that a full appreciation of the analogies between the three cases inspires a radical reconceptualization of the metaphysical issues and phenomena in each case.
In particular, I develop a novel meta-metaphysical framework for conceptualizing the structure shared by these domains. The framework I present is centered on the notion of a perspective, which I argue is the common thread that unites the first-personal, the temporal, and the modal. In the book I explicate the central metaphysical notion of a perspective that is relevant to thinking about these issues, and develop a framework for thinking about the surrounding debates explicitly in terms of perspectives. What I call the perspectives framework thus provides a way of reconceptualizing the debates in these and other analogous domains of metaphysical inquiry, in a way that both reflects and illuminates their shared structure.
A central upshot of the move to the perspectives framework is that it becomes clear that while one needn’t adopt structurally analogous positions in the debates in all three cases, realism about the phenomena in each case is to be characterized in a parallel way. I thus utilize the perspectives framework to present a novel characterization of realism that is uniform across the three domains, and which I argue is uniquely suited to accommodate our deep-seated intuitions about what genuine subjectivity, temporal passage, and metaphysical contingency ultimately entail.