In his opening address, "The Four-Fold Art of Avoiding Questions", Paul Weiss spoke of the need for a society that would reinvigorate philosophic inquiry. He denounced "parochialism," referring to those who insisted upon "some one method, say that of pragmatism, instrumentalism, idealism, analysis, linguistics or logistics, and denied the importance of meaningfulness of anything which lies beyond its scope or power," as well as those who confined their studies to only some historic era. Early in the history of the society, there was some dispute about whether certain schools of thought should be included in the program. By the second meeting there was controversy regarding papers by logicians, a controversy possibly fueled by the dominance of
positivism in that decade. Before 1960, there had been some fear of admitting the existential
metaphysics. However, as Paul Weiss remarked in 1969, the society had succeeded in accomplishing metaphysical diversity: A book on the history of the society,
Being in America: Sixty Years of the Metaphysical Society, was published by
Rodopi in 2014 in its
Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies Series. ==Findlay Book Prize==