What sort of thing are we? Animals? Souls? Computer programs? Something else entirely? We will address the question of what we are along with such related issues as our survival/persistence conditions and what matters (to us). We will focus on recent work in analytic metaphysics.

The past half-century has witnessed a significant revival of metaphysics. But questions about how and whether we can have knowledge (or even justified belief) about metaphysical matters still abound. In this course we will examine: (1) arguments for skepticism about metaphysics generally, ontology more specifically, and other particular metaphysical issues even more specifically; (2) positive proposals for how we might come to know certain metaphysical claims; (3) the epistemological status of intuitions, folk beliefs, the a priori, and appeal to theoretical virtues; and (4) Proper metaphysical methodology

Monism and pluralism are competing views about how unified the cosmos is. According to monism, the existence of many beings is at most a derivative fact, deriving from the existence and nature of a single fundamental being; and perhaps it is not a fact at all, but an illusion. According to pluralism, on the other hand, at the very least there are many fundamental beings; and perhaps the cosmos is so disjointed that the many fundamental beings bear no substantive relation to one another.  The two positions have widely divergent implications for other philosophical questions, and the divide between monism and pluralism is perhaps one of the deepest and most significant metaphysical divides. (William James once called it "the most central of all philosophic problems, central because so pregnant.") Presumably this partly explains the recurrence of the monism/pluralism debate at various points in the history of philosophy. And while the birth of analytic philosophy led to an almost total neglect of the issue for most of the twentieth century, the past few years have witnessed a resurgence of interest. In this course we will explore the debate through both historical works and contemporary readings.  Among other things we will investigate whether the “moderate” versions of monism and pluralism are coherent and whether it's possible to rationally believe the "radical" versions.