Abstract

This book presents the principles and categories of an ordinal metaphysics in relation to the metaphysical tradition and contemporary issues. It represents the only current systematic and metaphysical effort to resolve the difficulties that have made metaphysics suspect through most of the twentieth century. Ross begins with a summary of Justus Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, where the theory was first formulated, and then expands and develops Buchler’s ideas in important new directions. He seeks to replace the “cosmological view” that reality is single-valued and wholly determinate with a plural, functional, and ordinal ontology that avoids the major deficiencies of the metaphysical tradition and resolves many contemporary issues