The Definition of Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the most general attempt to make sense of things. This is my working definition, but I want to make clear from the outset how little, in certain critical respects, I claim on behalf of it. An ideal definition, one might think, would be at once crisp, substantive, and uncontroversial, as well as correct. In fact, of these, I claim only that my definition is crisp. I do not even say that it is ‘correct’; not if that means that it is answerable to something other than my own purposes in writing this book. And to have tried to attain substance without controversy would have been foolhardy, because the nature of metaphysics is itself a fiercely contested philosophical issue – indeed, as I see it, a fiercely contested metaphysical issue.

What I aim to do with this definition, first and foremost, is to indicate what my theme is. At the same time I aim to establish early connections between concepts that will be crucial to my project, connections that are intended to elucidate the definiens as well as the definiendum, though they also commit me on certain matters of dispute as I shall try to explain in the course of this Introduction. I hope that my definition is broadly in accord with standard uses of the word ‘metaphysics’, at least insofar as these are broadly in accord with one another, and I hope that I am singling out something worthy of the attention that I shall be devoting to it in this book. But if I am wrong in the former hope, then I am prepared to defer to the latter and accept that my definition is revisionary; while if I am wrong in the latter hope, then the fault lies with the book, not with the definition.