February Pick | Selected by Professor James Levine

Barry Stroud | Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction

Barry Stroud was a philosopher who taught at UC Berkeley from the mid-1960s and who remained philosophically active until his death in 2019.  His final book, Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction (2011) is, I think, one of the best recent books in philosophy.  It is a short, clear, and carefully argued discussion that distils his views on issues that preoccupied him from his earliest writings.  It is a fitting and graceful testament to a life’s work in philosophy.

The book is concerned with the extent to which metaphysical inquiry is possible. Are there some beliefs regarding reality that are so fundamental, or indispensable, for our thought, that we lack the critical distance from them necessary to undertake an open inquiry as to whether they are true?  

Focusing on beliefs regarding causality, necessity, and value, Barry argues that these beliefs are so central to our thought that we cannot coherently suppose them to be false.  But he argues as well that our inability to suppose coherently that they are false does not provide a guarantee that they are true.  Hence the title: does the very centrality of these beliefs to our thought—our unavoidable engagement with them—preclude us from having the sort of detachment from them that we would need in order to gain a satisfactory assessment of whether they are true?

Barry was one of my PhD supervisors when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. At that time, he worked primarily on the issue of external world scepticism (see his book The Philosophical Significance of Scepticism).  In retrospect, I think that that work on scepticism was less of an expression of his own philosophical voice (and more of a response to the views of others, in particular, those of his colleague Thompson Clarke) than his work on metaphysical inquiry, which has its roots in his early papers on transcendental arguments and which culminates in this, his last book.  I regret that I never communicated to him my appreciation of it.  For an interesting and moving tribute to Barry, see Thomas Nagel’s remarks at a memorial service for him, which begin at one hour and four minutes here>>