Amie Thomasson, "Rethinking Metaphysics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps, so I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the Best Education Podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast online.
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Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Sarah Tyson. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books and a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Amy Thomason, Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College. Her new book, Rethinking Metaphysics, is just out from Oxford University Press. The word metaphysics conjures up thoughts of very hard questions about reality and deep, perhaps unresolvable metaphysical mysteries. But is that the right way to think about the subject matter of metaphysics?
According to Thomason, very clearly no. In her new book, she argues that traditional views of metaphysics make the mistake of assuming that our concepts all function the same way. For example, that the job of metaphysics is to provide truth-makers for statements about necessity and possibility, about morality, about numbers, and so on, when each of these different forms of discourse can have very different aims. Thomason instead offers a deflationary view of metaphysics in which the job of metaphysicians is conceptual engineering, figuring out how our concepts and terms work in a discourse, what their various functions are, and what conceptual schemes we should adopt, particularly if our current ones are leading us into metaphysical pseudo-problems.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Amy Thomason. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Hello, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be talking about your book, Rethinking Metaphysics. No subtitle needed. So yeah, I mean, this is a project that you've been working on for a number of years. So let's first start with a little bit of background about you. I mean, how did you decide to become a philosopher and What led you to the writing of the book, which is, you know, as you mentioned in the beginning of the book, is actually third of a trilogy.
Yeah, so I started as a philosopher just by taking a class in my very first semester of college. I saw a class advertised as in metaphysics and epistemology, and I didn't know what those words meant, but the questions all looked like ones I'd asked myself my whole life. So I signed up, and it was a small seminar, and we read original classic works, and I was just hooked and stayed on right through that. As far as getting to this topic, so I started out in my career really working on a lot of first order issues in metaphysics. My dissertation and first book were on a theory of fiction, fictional characters and works of literature, and what they are and how they're related to authors, readers, copies of the text.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–9:05
2
What is the main focus of Amie Thomason’s new book *Rethinking Metaphysics*?
9:05–21:23
3
How does Thomason describe her shift from traditional first‑order metaphysics to a meta‑metaphysical approach?
21:23–35:28
4
What is conceptual engineering and why does Thomason see it as the core task of metaphysics?
35:28–46:24
5
How does Thomason use functional linguistics (systemic functional linguistics) to model conceptual engineering?
46:24–1:01:20
6
What are the three kinds of conceptual‑engineering projects Thomason identifies (empirical, normative, descriptive)?
1:01:20–1:02:37
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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Daniel Cohnitz and Jussi Haukioja, "Foundations for Metasemantics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Philippe Huneman, "When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian Approaches to the Concept of An Organism" (Routledge, 2026)
Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)