Varieties of Things, Foundations of Contemporary Metaphysics
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loginAs anybody who has an interest in metaphysics will know, a book onmetaphysics can cover any number of topics, from free will and deter-minism to causality, arguments for the existence of God, the problem ofevil, why there is something rather than nothing, personal identity, thenature of space and time, propositions, and possible worlds and pos-sibilia, to name just a few. While it is perfectly legitimate to include any,or all, of these topics in a book on metaphysics, I have come to thinkthat many of them presuppose an understanding of basic topics andissues in ontology, the study of what sorts or kinds of things there arein the world. For example, discussions of causality presume an under-standing of what sorts of things are involved in causal relations, whetherthese be events, states, or facts, and also of what sorts of things causallaws relate (whether they relate properties, conceived of as universals, orclasses of tropes, for example). The topics in ontology, to my mind, raisesome of the most fundamental and interesting questions in metaphysicsand, more generally, in philosophy.
