What is metaphysics? We, as human beings, strive for a comprehensive understanding of the world and our place in it.

This is the basic motivation for doing metaphysics: we ask ourselves what the world is really, ultimately like. Metaphysics is inextricably intertwined with our selfunderstanding: how we conceive of our place in reality makes a huge difference as to the metaphysics we are willing to adopt (e.g., Kantianism, realism, empiricism, dualism, idealism, etc.). However, we do not come into the world from outside, as it were: we start in medias res, already equipped with a broad practical and (more or less) theoretical understanding of reality, which is many-faceted, only partly articulated, often ambiguous, and difficult to pin down without distorting it. Furthermore, the various sciences present us with a huge stock of insights and results that we need to take into account when embarking upon the metaphysical quest for a comprehensive world-view. One difficulty here is that scientific results themselves usually get accompanied by metaphysical pictures, so that it is not easy to determine exactly what the pure scientific findings are, to distinguish these from the metaphysical pictures they are thought to give rise to. We cannot go look for the right answers to metaphysical questions by empirical means, because how we should incorporate our empirical findings into a comprehensive worldview is exactly one of the questions metaphysics is about. So we have to rely on our powers of thought and on rational debate, by discursive method. One of the dangers that come with this method is that it might degenerate into mere speculation cut loose from reality. Nor is there any way of securing that we are not. We can conscientiously develop positive metaphysical proposals, and critically assess those offered by others, trusting that we will thus eventually arrive at a world-view that genuinely makes sense of the world and of ourselves in it. We have to use language to pursue both our scientific and our metaphysical goals. It is my conviction that we should aim at a use of language that makes it a transparent medium through which we express our thoughts, which, in turn, should be our transparent access to reality. The use of formal methods should further this aim; and in particular, it should not stand in its way (as easily and too often happens, I believe). When doing metaphysics, we aim to grasp the most fundamental aspects of reality. Hence we look away from specific details and focus on what is, in some important sense, more general and fundamental. Instead of talking about chairs and trees we talk about substances, instead of acknowledging the richness in attitudes we humans can have towards reality (more or less practically involved, more or less emotionally involved, etc.), we focus on the mere desire for insight, for truth. There is a danger of losing touch with reality in this process, a danger of losing ourselves in abstract theorizing void of any connection with the world. We should thus always be able to see how our metaphysical world-view ties in with our practical and theoretical grasp on reality in real life. Quoting Sellarss famous remark can summarize my view of the aim of metaphysics: we attempt to understand how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term. Real possibility What does all of this mean for our specific topic, real possibility? I think real possibility can and should be a pivotal point in our overall understanding of reality. It is indispensable for making genuine sense of our ability to act freely, and hence for our scientific, experimental practice. This is achieved by its implication of a genuinely open

future, thus allowing for a conception of ourselves as being right where the action is, so to speak: what we do makes a difference as to what the future will look like, we actively contribute to bringing the future about. More generally, the present gets to have the special status we experience it to have. A decent notion of real possibility thus contributes to a metaphysical picture that is aptly concrete and dynamic, and not the product of mere abstract speculation (as I think much of what is currently produced under the banner of analytical metaphysics is). How do we go about arriving at such a picture? We have to make our ideas as clear as we can, trace out the presuppositions and implications for other parts of the metaphysical picture we are developing (e.g., modality as a basic feature of reality, an ontology of substances characterized by such modally basic features (potentialities), a suitable understanding of scientific experiment). We have to spell out exactly how the diverse elements of our picture hang together; we have to provide a coherent and sensible conceptual framework in which we can carry out these tasks; we have to consider whether our proposed world-view coheres with scientific findings; we have to critically compare our own proposals with others in the current literature. In my view, establishing and justifying the decidedly realist ring our proposal carries with it requires a satisfactory understanding of our own place in reality, and in particular, both of how our capacities for rational thought and action fit into the natural world and of how it can be that these same capacities enable us to develop such a thing as a coherent world-view at all. If we do not wish to belie our fundamental self-understanding as free, rational agents, what we need is a metaphysics that makes room for such beings as natural beings, which in turn requires us to resist the currently popular reductionist and physicalist/materialist tendencies.