The self in time

When I tell people that I am a professor of philosophy, and that I do metaphysics, I am usually greeted with either blank stares or scepticism. When the person I am talking with is a scientist, I get even worse than scepticism: I get raised eyebrows and the instant conclusion that am I a goofy flake, not an intelligent person, not an educated person, and that there is no need to talk with me any further.

This dismissive attitude of scientists toward metaphysics is the unfortunate legacy of a misguided philosophy of science called ‘logical positivism’, or ‘logical empiricism’, that was influential during most of the 20th century. According to logical positivism, only science is meaningful; metaphysics is nonsense. The logical positivists thought there was a way to distinguish clearly between science and metaphysics. They were wrong about that. They were wrong in just about everything they preached, as it turns out. But there are still a lot of people around who think metaphysics is nonsense, without being able