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.

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