Common Sense Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Lynne Rudder Baker

This book celebrates the research career of Lynne Rudder Baker by presenting sixteen new and critical essays from admiring students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends. Baker was a trenchant critic of physicalist conceptions of the universe. She was a staunch defender of a kind of practical realism, what she sometimes called a metaphysics of everyday life. It was this general “common sense” philosophical outlook that underwrote her famous constitution view of reality. Whereas most of her contemporaries were in general given to metaphysical reductionism and eliminativism, Baker was unapologetic and philosophically deft in her defense of ontological pluralism. The essays in this book engage with all aspects of her unique and influential work: practical realism about the mind; the constitution view of human persons; the first-person perspective; and God, Christianity, and naturalism.

Common Sense Metaphysics will be of interest to scholars of Baker’s work, as well as scholars and advanced students engaged in research on various topics in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion.

Luis R.G. Oliveira is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. He has published numerous articles in refereed journals, on topics in epistemology, ethics, and religion. He is also the director of the LATAM Bridges in the Epistemology of Religion, an international project focused on connecting Latin American philosophers to the Anglophone philosophical world.

Kevin J. Corcoran is professor of philosophy at Calvin University. He is the author of Rethinking Human Nature (2006), the co-author of Church in the Present Tense (2011), and the editor of Soul, Body and Survival (2001). He has also published numerous articles in refereed journals, on topics in metaphysics, mind, and religion.