Substance has long been one of the key categories in metaphysics. This Element focuses on contemporary work on substance, and in particular on contemporary substance ontologies, …
Historically, philosophical discussions of relations have featured chiefly as afterthoughts, loose ends to be addressed only after coming to terms with more important and pressing …
Philosophical thinking about time is characterised by tensions between competing conceptions. Different sources of evidence yield different conclusions about it. Common sense …
Identity criteria are powerful tools for the metaphysician. They tell us when items are identical or distinct. Some varieties of identity criteria also try to explain in virtue of …
This Element presents the main attempts to account for causation as a metaphysical concept, in terms of 1) regularities and laws of nature, 2) conditional probabilities and Bayes …
This Element is a survey of central topics in the metaphysics of material objects. The topics are grouped into four problem spaces. The first concerns how an object's parts are …
Persistence realism is the view that ordinary sentences that we think and utter about persisting objects are often true. Persistence realism involves both a semantic claim, about …
Philosophers often debate the existence of such things as numbers and propositions, and say that if these objects exist, they are abstract. But what does it mean to call something …
Formal ontology as a main branch of metaphysics investigates categories of being. In the formal ontological approach to metaphysics, these ontological categories are analysed by …
This Element presents and critically examines the relationship between metaphysics and the sciences. Section 1 provides a brief introduction. Section 2 looks at the methodological …
