Metaphysics: The Fundamentals

This manual is very useful for beginners in metaphysics, and is especially clear. Still, it has some major omissions and takes its premisses very seriously. One could expect the impossibility of a complete overview in an introductory book, but the problem to me is that some major themes or authors are not even mentioned, giving a quite one-sided view on the current state of metaphysics, especially on the matter of truthmakers, modality and meta-ontology. It often uses taxonomies which are not mainstream, making it more difficult to understand theorical separations as usually described in most studies and introductory papers. That said, my concerns are minor and for the presentation. It's certainly a good-enough starting point, and it's clear that the author is an expert in the field.

The authors attempt to give an overview of not one impossibly difficult subject, but *dozens* of impossibly difficult subjects that are all closely interlinked with one another -- while explaining both sides of the contemporary debate for every issue and citing sources appropriately, using widely accepted terminology, without compromising clarity for beginners like me. While there are moments when they seem to go off on a bit of a tangent, or get a little bit too wrapped up in their terms (which is something I'm told analytic philosophers are prone to do), the book is, for the most part, a resounding success, and was an excellent companion to me in my undergraduate Intro to Metaphysics class. I couldn't write this, and neither could you; thank goodness Koons and Pickavance did.Unfortunately, the book persuaded me that books don't exist, so take my review of this non-book with a grain of salt. :)