Introduction

The End of Metaphysics?
Old and New Metaphysics
Plan of the Book
Metaphysical vs. Epistemological "Emergence"

1. What is Metaphysics?: Transcendental Knowledge

Kinds of Knowledge
Characterizing Metaphysical Knowledge
The Possible and the Actual

Part I: The Ancient Crisis

2. Parmenides' Challenge: Truth or Seeming

The One and the Many
Physicalist and Idealist Reductionism
Genus and Difference
Parmenides' Two Ways
Seeming and the Sophists

3. Plato's Response: The Form of Difference

Plato's Program
Plato's Parmenides
Plato's Sophist
A Note on Dialectic
Conclusion

4. Aristotle's Response: Differentiated Individuals

Physicalist and Idealist Reductionism
Focal Meaning (p¿ò¿ ¿¿ Equivocation)
Substance: Neither Substratum nor Genus
Are Aggregates Substances?
Individuation and Differentiation
Archaic vs. Contemporary Aristotle
Conclusion

Part II: The Modern Crisis

5. Hume's Challenge: Matters of Fact or Relations of Ideas

Analytic and Synthetic Propositions
Formal Necessity or Material Contingency

6. Kant's Response: Straining against Formalism

Idealist (Logical) and Physicalist (Sensory) Formalism
Beyond Pure Formalism?
Analysis as "Improvement" of Form
Synthetic A Priori Principles of Empirical Inquiry
Teleological Judgment beyond the Limits of Formalism
The Non-Derivability of the Actual from the Possible
Formalism and Surrogate Content
Essential Difference: Necessity without Universality

7. Hegel's Response:  A Material Logic

Platonic Definition
Categories as Definitions of Absolute
Dialectical Inference
Successive Definitions: Dialectic and the Logic of Correction
The Problem of Differentiation and Hegel's Logic
Epistemic vs. Ontological Amplification
Hegel's Metaphysics of Physical Entities
Conclusion
Anti-Reductionism after Hegel

Part III: Toward a Metaphysics of Emergence

8. Physical Emergence: The Constraint Interpretation

Actualizing Constraints
Individualizing Constraints
Differentiating Constraints
The Ontology of Emergence
Are Artifacts and Aggregates Physical Entities?
Are Atoms and Molecules Physical Entities?
Conclusion

9. Life and Mind: The Autonomy of Form

The Distinctive Challenges of a Non-Formalist Metaphysics
Beyond Purely Physical Emergence
The Emergence of Life
The Emergence of Mind
Autonomy and Dualism

Notes
Bibliography
Index

James Blachowicz is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of Of Two Minds: The Nature of Inquiry, also published by SUNY Press.