The fundamental idea behind ”the linguistic turn of philosophy” is that the relation between language and thought is very intimate; hence the main task of philosophy is the analysis of language, by which the true meaning of philosophical theses (if they have any) may be uncovered (analysis understood either as the search for the true logical form or as an analysis of our ordinary conceptual schemes and linguistic behavior). In the first half of the twentieth century such linguistic approaches were often (though not without exception) accompanied by a radical rejection of metaphyics (that may be taken as the most characteristic feature of both Logical Positivism and Oxford Analysis). Somewhat surprisingly, however, in contemporary analytic philosophy, metaphysics is a completely legitimate subject. Some fundemental ideas that paved the way for the ”return of metaphysics”, are course, well-known. The failure of finding a sufficiently sharp demarcation criterion by which metaphysics can be cut off, Quine’s (and Davidson’s) attacks on the ”empiricist dogmas”, the question-begging nature of ordinary-language analysis, or the influence of Kripke’s openly metaphysical philosophy surely undermined the idea that metaphysics is simply senseless.

My lecture aims at presenting some less known details of this process of re-legitimation of metaphysics in analytic philosophy. I want to investigate the views the ex-Viennese logical empiricist, Herbert Feigl. Feigl’s ideas were rather unorthodox: he did not share the radical anti-metaphysical stance of Neurath and Carnap and held already in the thirties that there were meaningful metaphysical statements. Some of his metaphysical tenets may be illuminated by contrasting them with Schlick’s and Carnap’s ideas. For example, Feigl’s view on the mind-body problem earned much from his mentor Moritz Schlick´s early (pre-Vienna Circle) metaphysical realist identity theory; but his understanding of the status of theoretical entities (cf. e.g. his ”Existential Hypotheses”), which is also relevant concerning his mind-brain identity theory, have much in common with the later Carnap’s views (”Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology”). Nevertheless, there are important differences: while Carnap maintained his anti-metaphysical stance until the very end of his career, (claiming e.g. that the choice of a physicalistic language over a mentalistic one is guided only by pragmatic considerations), Feigl sticked to a metaphysical approach. In my presentation I intend to reconstruct Feigl’s views on the status of metaphysics, and investigate whether his attempt to combine logical empiricism with metaphysics may be deemed successful.