Robert C. Koons - Metaphysics: The Fundamentals

1. Chapter 02

1. Chapter 02
2. Chapter 03
3. Chapter 05
4. Chapter 08
5. Chapter 09

Series Editor: A. P. Martinich, University of Texas at Austin

Each volume in the Fundamentals of Philosophy series covers a key area of study in philosophy. Written with verve and clarity by leading philosophers, these authoritative volumes look to reveal the fundamental issues and core problems that drive interest in the field.

1. Julia Driver, Ethics: The Fundamentals
2. Mark C. Murphy, Philosophy of Law: The Fundamentals
3. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Philosophy of Religion: An Historical Introduction
4. Robert C. Koons and Timothy H. Pickavance, Metaphysics: The Fundamentals

Forthcoming
Thom Brooks, Political Philosophy: The Fundamentals
Randall Curren, Philosophy of Education: The Fundamentals
Thomas Kelly and James Pryor, What Should We Believe? The Fundamentals of Epistemology
Ned Hall, Philosophy of Science: The Fundamentals

Robert C. Koons and Timothy H. Pickavance

This edition first published 2015
2015 Robert C. Koons and Timothy H. Pickavance

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Koons, Robert C.
Metaphysics: the fundamentals / Robert C. Koons and Timothy H. Pickavance.
pagescm
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9574-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-4051-9573-7 (paper)
1.Metaphysics.I.Pickavance, Timothy H.II.Title.
BD111.K665 2015
110dc23

2014030070

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: atribut/Shutterstock

To Bruce and Margaret Koons
and
To Ann Lawson and Tom and Sue Pickavance

We would like to thank our series editor, Al Martinich, for his invitation to undertake this project and for his encouragement and patience in seeing it through. We would also like to thank our editors at Wiley Blackwell, Nick Bellorini, Jeff Dean, Liam Cooper, and Deirdre Ilkson, and editorial assistants Tiffany Mok, Nicole Benevenia, and Allison Kostka.

Thanks also to Al Plantinga, Laurie Paul, Graham Priest, Peter Forrest, Dan Korman, Trenton Merricks, and Josh Parsons for the helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the book. Thanks to Robert Garcia, from whom we've learned most of what we know about tropes, and to Alex Pruss for his many insights into material composition.

We both have taught this material in metaphysics seminars at our respective institutions, and a number of our students supplied helpful feedback, with respect to both content and presentation. Especially notable contributions came from Daniel Eaton, Patrick Grafton-Cardwell, Nicole Garcia, Tim Houk, Sarah Nicholson, and Jarod Sickler. Thanks to Richard Lawton Davis for insight into composition as identity, and to Bryan Pickel and Nick Mantegani for their contributions to our understanding of ostrich nominalism and Quinean ontology.

We want to acknowledge the living titans of contemporary metaphysics on whose shoulders we are sitting, including Saul Kripke, Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert M. Adams, as well as those who have died, especially David K. Lewis and David M. Armstrong. In addition to those we've already mentioned, our debt to the work of John Hawthorne, Dean Zimmerman, Ted Sider, Jonathan Schaffer, Jos Benardete, Kit Fine, Michael Loux, Sydney Shoemaker, Michael Tooley, and David Chalmers is obvious and substantial.

Finally, our gratitude to our patient and longsuffering wives, Debbie and Jamie, without whom we could have done nothing.

THP adds: Thanks to Biola University for a Faculty Research and Development Grant in 2010, as well as to Dennis Dirks, Mike Wilkins, and Scott Rae, each current or former administrators at Biola, for a semester-long research leave in fall 2011. These provided helpful breaks from teaching that greatly spurred this project along. Another round of thanks to my dear friend, Robert Garcia, who has been a source not only of philosophical stimulation, but of faithful encouragement and support. Finally, I've somehow stumbled into the privilege of writing philosophy with my first metaphysics teacher, J. P. Moreland, as well as with my last metaphysics teacher, my dissertation supervisor, Rob Koons. Both are incredible philosophers who are even more incredible human beings. I owe not only my knowledge of metaphysics, but also my philosophical career to the pair of them. My deepest gratitude to them both.

The great Greek philosopher Plato wrote (in the dialogue Theaetetus) that philosophy begins in wonder, a phrase repeated by his student Aristotle in his Metaphysics. This is especially true of that branch of philosophy that we, echoing the title of Aristotle's book, call metaphysics. In metaphysics we puzzle and wonder about what exists and what existing things are like, in their most fundamental features and interrelationships.