Accueil
"The distinctive goal of the metaphysician is to understand the structure of reality: what kinds of entities exist and what are their most fundamental and general features and relations. Unlike the natural and social sciences that seek to describe some special class of entities and what they are like – the physical things or the living things, particular civilizations or cultures metaphysicians ask the most general questions about how things are, what our universe is like.
We will have more to say in the chapters that come about what are the main issues in metaphysics today and what exactly is the relationship between metaphysics and those other ways we have of studying what the world is like, science and theology." (p.XIII)
"To say this book presents an introduction to contemporary analytical metaphysics is to signal that the emphasis of this book will be in stating views and arguments clearly and with logical precision. As a result, in many places this book will make use of the tools of modern symbolic logic. Ideally a student using this book will already have had a course introducing the basics of first order predicate logic. For those who have not already had such a course, a preparatory chapter is provided which should bring one up to speed." (p.XIII)
[Preparatory Background - Logic for Metaphysics, pp.1-29]
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-Alyssa Ney, Metaphysics. An Introduction, Routledge, 2014, 310 pages.
