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What is this thing called Metaphysics?

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I used this book for my text in Metaphysics last semester. Brian Garrett is quite a good philosopher, maybe not such a great expositor. One of his epigrams is "Omit needless words," but while I agree that brevity is often conducive to clarity, this book, meant to be an introductory text in metaphysics, is often too compressed. I needed to find more material for the last three weeks of the semester because we had got through it. He also has a taste for deconstructing pseudoproblems, an important and useful thing to do, but this is not a particularly positive take on the subject for undergraduates. For example, why finish with "Realism and anti-realism" if one thinks that there is nothing to this discussion? Why not just leave it out? Chapter sequencing reflects no discernible narrative plan. I thought the best chapters were the ones on "Existence," "Causation," and "Personal Identity." "Time" is a fascinating topic that deserves more than McTaggart and Russell. "God" is not at this point a required chapter in a metaphysics book, if one has nothing interesting to say. I did benefit from his deflationary account of the problem of fate, as I say he is a good philosopher. As a teacher I have been much happier with Michael Loux's book Metaphysics: a contemporary introduction, which is much stronger on the relevance of metaphysics for contemporary philosophy. Carter's Elements of Metaphysics has flaws but is also quite a bit sexier for teaching than this one.

Metaphysics, in modern times, has developed a fairly bad reputation. Once the queen of philosophical investigations (just think Aristotle), it was first attacked by Hume with his famous "fork" ("If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), then by the logical positivists of the early 20th century, who dismissed the entire enterprise as literally incoherent, its utterances being meaningless. But that is surely too quick. We do understand what people say when they talk about god, or time, or causation, or existence, which is why I wanted to refresh my acquaintance with metaphysics by reading this introduction to the topic. The book is reasonably well written, though one gets the nagging idea that the author has picked some particular positions and sub-topics from the literature, leaving several important others completely untouched. This of course is to be expected in any introductory book, but surely there is something more interesting than modal realism to talk about in the chapter on existence; equally likely, perhaps scientific work on time (Einstein!) deserves a bit more than one line in the chapter devoted to that issue. Still, reading Garrett's book one does get a good taste of what metaphysics is about, and for me that confirmed my somewhat schizophrenic attitude toward the whole field. I have absolutely no patience for some common hair-brained ideas (again, modal realism comes to mind), and for the general penchant of so many metaphysicians (shouldn't they be called metaphysicists?) to ignore the obviously relevant contributions of science to their subject matter. But it is true that classic work on, say, the arguments concerning the existence of god, or the concept of free will, or of personal identity, and even conceptual investigations into the idea of causality, do make for stimulating food for thought. As usual in philosophy, the point is not to reach consensus about a particular answer, but rather to appreciate the complexities and the logic of the arguments.