Philosopher Michael Raven Challenges Worthiness of Branch of Metaphysics

By James Devitt

      Michael Raven’s doctorate in philosophy from NYU is real—he did the requisite coursework and wrote a dissertation. And his first faculty appointment is real—he will be an assistant professor at the University of Victoria in Canada this fall in the Department of Philosophy.
      What Raven is less certain about is how to unveil what is “real” in a way not already covered by other disciplines, such as the natural sciences. His scholarship raises questions about ontology, the branch of metaphysics about what ultimate reality constitutes.
      “Ontology asks whether God, Plato’s forms, numbers, moral facts, and unobservable theoretical particles, souls, and so on, are real,” explains the Seattle native. “These questions seem profound. How we conceive of ourselves depends upon whether souls are real. Our understanding of mathematics and what makes its applications to science and our ordinary lives possible may turn on whether numbers are real or are unreal but useful posits.”
      But, Raven observes, some questions stemming from ontology may seem “empty.”
      “There’s no use in positing the existence of a chair in addition to its parts; the parts alone support us when we sit,” he says. “Or it may seem trivial that the chair exists; you’re sitting on it. Ontological questions may then seem empty because they are useless or trivial.”
      Raven, a graduate of Reed College, adds that this creates a paradox, making his discipline “seem both profound and empty.” In response, he seeks to test ontology’s worthiness as a pillar of philosophy and, if found lacking, as he hypothesizes, develop an alternative.
      “We can make progress by reviving a tradition stretching back to Plato and Aristotle which takes ‘the fundamental’ to be central to ontology. My dissertation develops this tradition in a new way that not only clarifies ontological questions and how to answer them, but illuminates how to settle whether they are as profound as they seem or as empty as skeptics allege.”