Eschatology and Metphysics

It is nice that Grice uses a special word "eschatology" for (at least some of) his metaphysical ruminations, since that makes it easier to talk about the different conceptions of metaphysics that Carnap and Grice have, and slightly easier to find a way of talking about them both at once.

So far as Aristotle is concerned, the word metaphysics doesn't really come in, because it only appeared after Aristotle, his contribution being just the order in which his books came (I have no idea whether even that really was down to Aristotle).   What Aristotle called the contents of the book which we call the Metaphysics was "First Philosophy" which sounds just like an opposite of "Eschatology".  This is probably just a curiosity, since there isn't much doubt that Aristotle was thinking of "First Philosophy" as being "ultimate" in some sense or other.

In Speranza's story about Grice's philosophical eschatology, it seems that Aristotle's categories loom large.  I suppose this is understandable in the context of Ryle making a big deal about category mistakes, but it sounds more like descriptive or exegetical metaphysics than "revisionist" metaphysics, which is probably where we need to be to escape accident and language and home in on essence and the absolute.

So far I don't have a good idea of how Grice is separates out the truly eschatological from the accidents of descriptive metaphysics.

Roger Jones