A Survey of Metaphysics

"The first book I’m going to mention is by the philosopher who first taught me metaphysics — when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s — the late E.J. Lowe or Jonathan Lowe at Durham University. Long after he taught me, he wrote a wonderful book called A Survey of Metaphysics , which is very lucid and detailed. It’s not immensely difficult but it’s not talking down to people, it’s not metaphysics made simple either. It doesn’t have the admirable quality of Philosophy: The Basics which could be read by anybody, but it’s a survey of the main — or what Lowe considers to be — the central questions of metaphysics. He divides the book into six sections: The first is about identity and change, the question I mentioned. The second section is about necessity and the essence of things. The third is about causation. The fourth is about agency and human agency. The fifth is about space and time, and the sixth is about the universal and the particular. It’s just a fantastically lucid account of those six central questions of the western metaphysical tradition. I suppose that is one thing about metaphysics, it is very abstract. Say causation: it’s very hard to grasp the idea of causation in the abstract. When you say one thing causes something else, so one thing makes something else happen, what is that? What is causation? Is there such a thing, what does it involve? This has been a central question of metaphysics since Aristotle really, and you have to consider these things in an incredibly abstract way. This is why it can be very daunting to people, and it’s not to everyone’s taste. But I don’t think the logical positivists or Wittgenstein have shown us that it’s impossible, and Lowe’s book, in fact, shows how you can make sense of these questions. Yes, I would say it’s a very reliable guide to the subject as Jonathan Lowe saw it. He had very, very strong views himself in metaphysics, so it shouldn’t be taken as an even-handed overview of everyone’s views. But I think it could be read by someone without an enormous background in philosophy, unlike, say, Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics , which is a very different kind of book, it isn’t an introduction at all, it may not even be metaphysics…"