Science-based Metaphysics: On Some Recent Anti-metaphysical Claims

This paper focuses on the debate concerning whether and, if at all, in what way metaphysics should be accepted alongside science. It examines some recent objections levelled, among others, by Bas Van Fraassen against metaphysics as an intelligible and autonomous enterprise worth pursuing. Replies to these objections are formulated. Science-based metaphysics is then defined in some detail, essentially as an a priori study of a possibility space that requires metaphysics to be 'fleshed out', as it were, on the basis of science, but at the same time renders it necessary for the interpretation, and thus proper understanding, of science itself. Crucially, the resulting framework questions the idea that naturalism necessarily entails the elimination of metaphysics or its ontological/methodological reduction to science.