A Companion to Metaphysics

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 About the Editor

Since its first publication, A Companion to Metaphysics has established itself as the leading one–volume reference resource in the field. This extended and revised new edition brings the Companion up to date. A new section of longer review essays focuses on the major topics that continue to have an abiding centrality for the field and which have seen significant developments in recent years, including Fictional Entities, Individuation, Persistence, Realism & Anti–realism about Abstract Entities, as well as Causation, Free Will, the Mind/Body Problem, Modality, Space & Time, and Substance. In addition the central A–Z section, consisting of nearly three hundred entries, has been extended with new entries on emerging topics and major metaphysicians, and the existing entries have been brought up to date where necessary.

Written by leading figures in the field and offering comprehensive coverage of both historical and contemporary metaphysics and from analytic and continental traditions, the entries in this extensively cross–referenced volume combine to form a complete and up–to–date reference guide for students and professionals alike.

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Blackwell Companions to Philosophy

This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today’s leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key figures, terms, topics, and problems of the field. Taken together, the volumes provide the ideal basis for course use, representing an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike.

Recent titles in the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series include:

The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, Second Edition
Edited by Nicholas Bunnin and Eric Tsui–James

A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (two–volume set), Second Edition
Edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit

A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology
Edited by Sahotra Sarkar and Anya Plutynski

A Companion to Hume
Edited by Elizabeth S. Radcliffe

A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography
Edited by Aviezer Tucker

A Companion to Aristotle
Edited by Georgios Anagnostopoulos

List of Contributors vii

Introduction xiii

Part I Extended Essays 1

Part II Metaphysics From A to Z 95

Index 637

Jaegwon Kim is William Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. His publications include a number of influential papers in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, and the books Supervenience and Mind (1993), Mind in a Physical World (1998), Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (2005), and Philosophy of Mind, 2nd edn. (2006). He is co–editor of Blackwell’s Epistemology: An Anthology, 2nd edn. (2008).

Ernest Sosa is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. With Jonathan Dancy he is also co–editor of another volume in the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy Series: A Companion to Epistemology (1993); and, with Laurence BonJour, of Epistemic Justification (2003), a volume in the Blackwell Great Debates in Philosophy series. His other publications include Knowledge in Perspective (1991), A Virtue Epistemology (2007), and Reflective Knowledge (2009).

Gary S. Rosenkrantz is Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A practicing metaphysician for more than 30 years, Professor Rosenkrantz′s published books include Haecceity: An Ontological Essay (1993), and three works co–authored with Joshua Hoffman: Substance Among Other Categories (1994), Substance: Its Nature and Existence (1996), and The Divine Attributes (2002).

?This is a resource no metaphysician in the Anglo–American tradition will want to do without. Summing Up: Essential.? ( CHOICE, October 2009)