Facing Reality: A Challenge to Physicalism

Contemporary Analytic metaphysics affirms some pretty surprising claims, such as that ordinary material things, such as tables, chairs, the bodies of persons, their brains, etc. do not exist. The source of all these absurd views is their common and generally unspoken commitment to Galilean Physicalism, the thesis that nothing exists except what is "quantified over" by contemporary physics, which is usually restricted to elemental particles, their properties, forces, and fields. This volume in the Metaphysica in Nuce series attacks Galilean Physicalism on metaphysical grounds and prepares the way for a return to the traditional realism represented by an Aristotelian ontology of material things.