Hocbigg - Metaphysics

Introduction

Metaphysics is the systematic inquiry into the fundamental structure of reality. While empirical sciences examine how specific physical systems behave, metaphysics investigates the foundational categories and principles that make any worldview intelligible: what it means for something to exist, what distinguishes an object from its properties, whether time genuinely flows or is a static dimension, what connects a cause to its effect, and what preserves the identity of a person across change. Studying metaphysics sharpens conceptual precision, surfaces hidden assumptions behind scientific theories, and develops the ability to evaluate rigorous abstract arguments that empirical observation alone cannot settle.

This curriculum is designed for self-directed learners with no prior formal background in academic philosophy. You do not need university enrollment or access to academic library subscriptions; all subjects rely on accessible textbooks, canonical monographs, open-access texts, and freely auditable courses. Metaphysics does, however, require patient and disciplined reading. Metaphysical arguments often hinge on fine-grained distinctions between concepts, words, and real entities, so progress depends on reading texts closely, breaking arguments into explicit premises and conclusions, and engaging with formal symbolic representations.

How to Navigate the Curriculum

The curriculum is arranged in three progressive stages that build foundational concepts before applying them to specific debates:

Orientation and Logical Tools: Begin with Introduction to Metaphysics and Logic for Metaphysics. Formal logic is the essential toolkit of modern metaphysics. Working through first-order predicate logic with identity equips you with the formal machinery required to analyze ontological commitment, quantify over entities, and evaluate arguments without linguistic confusion.
Historical Foundations: Proceed next to Ancient Metaphysics and Early Modern Metaphysics. Modern analytic debates do not exist in a vacuum; contemporary positions on universals, substance, mind-body interaction, and causation are direct re-examinations of problems framed by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume. Understanding these historical roots makes modern analytic formulations immediately more intelligible.
Core Analytic Problem Spaces: The remaining units cover the core systematic debates of the discipline: ontology, modality, time, causation, material objects, personal identity, and free will. While these problem areas can be studied in varying sequences, tackling Ontology, Categories, and Properties and Modality and Possible Worlds first will make the rest far easier. Subsequent debates—such as the persistence of objects across time, counterfactual accounts of causation, and incompatibilist arguments about free will—rely constantly on property theory and possible-worlds semantics.

Next Steps

This curriculum is strictly limited to the foundational core: the central concepts, landmark arguments, and standard frameworks that form the prerequisite baseline for anyone studying metaphysics. It deliberately omits specialized subfields, technical research methodologies, and niche contemporary debates.

After completing this foundational core, you can branch out into specialized subfields through Advanced Topics, engage directly with landmark treatises and essays through Readings, study full-length recorded lecture series through Courses, or apply your knowledge through practical modeling, formalization, and writing via Projects.

Communities

Forums:
Subreddits:
Discord servers:
- The Philosophy Chat
Other:
You can also interact through GitHub issues. If there is a problem with a course, or a change needs to be made to the curriculum, this is the place to start the conversation. Read more here.

Curriculum

Introduction to Metaphysics

Introduces the fundamental questions, vocabulary, and methodology of metaphysics, analyzing what reality consists of and how to evaluate metaphysical claims.

Riddles of Existence: A Guided Tour of Metaphysics (Earl Conee & Theodore Sider) - An informal, highly accessible entry point that introduces the central riddles of metaphysics using vivid thought experiments for absolute beginners.

An Introduction to Metaphysics (John W. Carroll & Ned Markosian) - A systematic introductory textbook that formalizes arguments and counterarguments; read alongside or immediately after Conee and Sider for greater analytical rigor.

Reality Bites: Introduction to Metaphysics (Coursera / Erasmus University Rotterdam) - An interactive video course that grounds abstract metaphysical topics—such as universals, substance, time, and composition—in everyday physical examples.

Logic for Metaphysics

Covers formal validity, truth-functional propositional logic, and first-order predicate logic with identity, establishing the deductive reasoning required to analyze metaphysical theories.

forall x: Calgary (Aaron Thomas-Bolduc & Richard Zach / Open Logic Project) - A comprehensive, open-access textbook covering truth tables, formal semantics, natural deduction proofs, and predicate logic with identity.

Introduction to Logic (Coursera / Stanford University) - An interactive video course on formal logical deduction that serves as a practical, computational companion or alternative to the Calgary text.

Ancient Metaphysics

Examines the classical origins of Western metaphysics, focusing on the Presocratic problem of change, Plato's Theory of Forms, and Aristotle's doctrine of categories, substance, and hylomorphism.

Ancient Philosophy: Plato and His Predecessors (Coursera / University of Pennsylvania) - A video lecture course tracing the earliest Western inquiries into reality and change from the Milesians and Parmenides through Plato's metaphysical dialogues.

Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and His Successors (Coursera / University of Pennsylvania) - The direct sequel to the Plato course, delivering focused instruction on Aristotle's Categories, natural philosophy, four causes, and metaphysical substance.

Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle (S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd, & C. D. C. Reeve, eds.) - The canonical print anthology containing the essential primary texts with explanatory introductions and commentary to accompany the UPenn courses.

The Internet Classics Archive (MIT) - A free repository of public-domain translations of Plato's dialogues and Aristotle's Categories, Physics, and Metaphysics.

Early Modern Metaphysics

Investigates seventeenth- and eighteenth-century metaphysical systems, including Cartesian mind-body dualism, Spinozist monism, Leibnizian monadology, and British empiricist analyses of substance and causation.

General Philosophy (University of Oxford Podcasts / Peter Millican) - An Oxford lecture series that critically evaluates early modern metaphysics, with dedicated lectures on Descartes' dualism, Locke on personal identity, and Hume on causation.

Meditations on First Philosophy (Early Modern Texts / René Descartes, trans. Jonathan Bennett) - A freely available, modernized primary text establishing foundational arguments for substance dualism and the metaphysical status of the mind.

Monadology (Early Modern Texts / G. W. Leibniz, trans. Jonathan Bennett) - A concise, modernized translation of Leibniz's system of immaterial simple substances, perceptual perspectives, and pre-established harmony.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Early Modern Texts / David Hume, trans. Jonathan Bennett) - Modernized primary reading presenting Hume's critique of necessary causal connections and the concept of substantial underlying identity.

Ontology, Categories, and Properties

Investigates what fundamentally exists, examining the debate over universals between metaphysical realism and nominalism, the nature of properties and tropes, and contemporary theories of metaphysical grounding.

Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Michael J. Loux & Thomas M. Crisp) - Chapters 1 through 3 provide clear conceptual overviews of metaphysical realism, nominalist alternatives, and substratum versus bundle views of particulars.

Metaphysics: An Anthology (Jaegwon Kim, Daniel Z. Korman, & Ernest Sosa, eds.) - Part I serves as the essential primary-source reader to use alongside Loux and Crisp, collecting seminal essays like Quine's "On What There Is" and contemporary papers on ontological grounding.

Metaphysics (Peter van Inwagen) - Part I offers an alternative, highly engaging introductory treatise defending Quinean meta-ontology and the rigorous analysis of existence claims.

Modality and Possible Worlds

Analyzes the metaphysical status of necessity and possibility, the ontological interpretation of possible worlds, the de re versus de dicto distinction, and essentialism.

Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Michael J. Loux & Thomas M. Crisp) - Chapter 5 presents the foundational textbook explanation of possible worlds semantics, contrasting David Lewis's genuine modal realism with ersatz realism.

Naming and Necessity (Saul A. Kripke) - The foundational monograph that revived modern metaphysics by demonstrating that necessity is an ontological property distinct from the epistemic concept of apriority.

Metaphysics: An Anthology (Jaegwon Kim, Daniel Z. Korman, & Ernest Sosa, eds.) - Part II collects essential primary papers debating modal realism, counterfactual conditionals, and essentialism by David Lewis and Alvin Plantinga.

Time and Persistence

Explores the nature of temporal passage—contrasting the dynamic A-theory with the static B-theory—and examines how physical objects persist across time through endurance or four-dimensional perdurance.

Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Michael J. Loux & Thomas M. Crisp) - Chapters 7 and 8 provide the introductory foundation, breaking down McTaggart's temporal series, presentism versus eternalism, and the problem of change.

Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Theodore Sider) - The landmark monograph building upon introductory time metaphysics to argue that objects persist through time by having temporal parts.

Metaphysics: An Anthology (Jaegwon Kim, Daniel Z. Korman, & Ernest Sosa, eds.) - Part V provides the canonical primary source collection on time and persistence, including McTaggart's classic essay and debates between Judith Jarvis Thomson and David Lewis.

Causation and Laws of Nature

Examines what relates causes to their effects—evaluating regularity, counterfactual, and dispositional powers accounts—and investigates whether laws of nature govern reality or merely summarize regularities.

Causation: A Very Short Introduction (Stephen Mumford & Rani Lill Anjum) - A concise, accessible entry point surveying regularity theories, counterfactual dependence, physical processes, and dispositional causal powers.

An Introduction to Metaphysics (John W. Carroll & Ned Markosian) - Chapter 6 builds directly on introductory concepts to provide a formal analysis of counterfactual causation and competing theories of natural law.

Metaphysics: An Anthology (Jaegwon Kim, Daniel Z. Korman, & Ernest Sosa, eds.) - Part VI gathers the classic modern primary literature on the nature of causal relations and governing laws, including papers by J.L. Mackie, David Lewis, and David Armstrong.

Material Objects and Mereology

Investigates parts and wholes, addressing the Special Composition Question, the problem of material constitution, and puzzles of temporary identity and coincidence.

Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Michael J. Loux & Thomas M. Crisp) - Chapter 9 delivers the textbook breakdown of classical mereology and introduces classic paradoxes like the Ship of Theseus and the Statue and the Lump of Clay.

Material Beings (Peter van Inwagen) - The definitive monograph on material composition, arguing that composite physical objects exist only when their parts constitute a biological life.

Metaphysics: An Anthology (Jaegwon Kim, Daniel Z. Korman, & Ernest Sosa, eds.) - Part VII collects foundational primary essays on mereological sums, constitution versus identity, and ordinary material objects.

Personal Identity and the Mind-Body Problem

Analyzes the metaphysical relationship between physical bodies and conscious experience, exploring criteria for personal survival across time such as biological animalism and psychological continuity.

Death (Yale Open Courses / Shelly Kagan) - A complete open video lecture series whose first half (lectures 2–14) provides an exceptionally clear analysis of dualism versus physicalism and the problem of personal identity.

Personal Identity (John Perry, ed.) - The standard historical and analytical reader tracing the persistence of persons from John Locke and Thomas Reid through modern split-brain cases.

Reasons and Persons (Derek Parfit) - Part 3 presents a radical reductionist account of personal identity, arguing through teletransportation and fission thought experiments that identity is not what matters for survival.

Free Will, Determinism, and Agency

Investigates whether genuine human freedom and moral responsibility can exist in a deterministic universe, evaluating compatibilism, incompatibilism, and agent-causal theories.

An Essay on Free Will (Peter van Inwagen) - The canonical modern defense of incompatibilism, formulating the Consequence Argument to demonstrate that determinism precludes the ability to do otherwise.

General Philosophy: Free Will and Determinism (University of Oxford Podcasts / Peter Millican) - Standalone university audio/video lectures that clearly break down classical compatibilism, Frankfurt-style counterexamples, and the dilemma of determinism.

An Introduction to Metaphysics (John W. Carroll & Ned Markosian) - Chapter 4 serves as an accessible textbook introduction to the debate, balancing incompatibilist arguments with modern compatibilist and libertarian responses.