Great Readings
This curated collection gathers milestone treatises, transformative monographs, and field-defining essays in Metaphysics.
Rather than introductory survey textbooks, these works represent the seminal conceptual breakthroughs, systematic frameworks, and dialectical debates that define historical, analytic, and contemporary metaphysical inquiry.
- Historical Foundations of Metaphysics
- Ontology, Categories, and Fundamentality
- Modality, Essence, and Possible Worlds
- Time, Persistence, and Material Constitution
- Causation, Laws, and Metaphysics of Science
- Mind, Personal Identity, and Free Will
- Social Ontology and Conceptual Engineering
Historical Foundations of Metaphysics
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Metaphysics | Aristotle |
| Meditations on First Philosophy | René Descartes |
| Ethics | Baruch Spinoza |
| Monadology | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz |
| An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding | David Hume |
| Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics | Immanuel Kant |
| Being and Time | Martin Heidegger |
Ontology, Categories, and Fundamentality
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (includes "On What There Is") | W. V. O. Quine |
| Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics | P. F. Strawson |
| Sameness and Substance Renewed | David Wiggins |
| Writing the Book of the World | Theodore Sider |
| Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology | David J. Chalmers, David Manley, & Ryan Wasserman (eds.) |
Modality, Essence, and Possible Worlds
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Naming and Necessity | Saul A. Kripke |
| The Nature of Necessity | Alvin Plantinga |
| On the Plurality of Worlds | David Lewis |
| Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers (includes "Essence and Modality") | Kit Fine |
Time, Persistence, and Material Constitution
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Unreality of Time | J. M. E. McTaggart |
| Material Beings | Peter van Inwagen |
| Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time | Theodore Sider |
| Parts: A Study in Ontology | Peter Simons |
| Objects and Persons | Trenton Merricks |
Causation, Laws, and Metaphysics of Science
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation | J. L. Mackie |
| Philosophical Papers: Volume II (includes "Causation") | David Lewis |
| What Is a Law of Nature? | D. M. Armstrong |
| Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time | Tim Maudlin |
| Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized | James Ladyman & Don Ross |
Mind, Personal Identity, and Free Will
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Mortal Questions (includes "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?") | Thomas Nagel |
| The Importance of What We Care About (includes "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility") | Harry G. Frankfurt |
| An Essay on Free Will | Peter van Inwagen |
| Reasons and Persons | Derek Parfit |
| The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory | David J. Chalmers |
| Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation | Jaegwon Kim |
Social Ontology and Conceptual Engineering
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Construction of Social Reality | John R. Searle |
| Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique | Sally Haslanger |
| Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering | Herman Cappelen |
| Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents | Christian List & Philip Pettit |