We make sense of our lives, and of much else, largely by means of stories. Family stories help us understand where we came from, who we are, and where we might be going. So do the stories we tell about the founding of our nation, and about its subsequent struggles, triumphs and tragedies. Nor does the narrative urge stop there. So determined are we to make sense of things that we tell stories about the first human being, indeed about the origin and the nature of the whole universe. We then try to fit our personal stories into these larger ones, hoping to endow our lives with transcendent meaning.

Notoriously, stories that sustain us can also let us down. We may find that they do not correspond to reality. In my own family, my father's father got his start as a semi-literate cowboy in West Texas in the 1880's. In those days, stealing horses was esteemed about as highly as dealing drugs is today, and the punishment was appreciably more swift. Years later, Granddad Post, now settled and prosperous, decided to trace his assuredly respectable family tree, his father among other things having fought honorably for the South at Shiloh. But he gave up genealogy when at some point he "came across a bunch of horse thieves."

Like so many stories, this one resonates on more than one level. Not only does it poke fun at certain pretensions (though Granddad had relatively few, often telling stories like this on himself). It says to the impressionable young listener that a measure of skepticism is in order when people strut their stories, and that a sense of irony and a capacity for self-satire are likewise in order when we compose our own. The story we would like to tell could be wrong, and we should not be all that surprised if it is. Appearances are one thing, reality often another.

Many of the stories we inherit are metaphysical, in the sense that they are about the origins, the nature, the meaning, and the unity of the world. In West Texas, the inherited metaphysical story in the 1880's was drawn largely from Scripture. The world was created by God only a few thousand years ago, its plant and animal species much as they are now, its human beings dual in nature, having a material, corruptible body and an immaterial, immortal soul. The meaning of life was to be found in these terms or not at all. Hence people resisted anything that might undermine the fundamental story, including above all the accumulating evidence from the sciences for a much older earth, an earth on which all species, humans included, appear and evolve by purely natural means. The very distinction between the human and the animal, and between the mind and the body -- a distinction on which morality itself seemed to rest -- was threatened and had to be protected at all costs. The offense to respectability was worse even than descent from a bunch of horse thieves, since it amounted to descent from ape-like creatures no one could imagine, let alone stomach, at a family reunion.

With the advantage of hindsight, we can more readily see this episode as but one instance, though an especially trying one that is still with us, of how each generation must come to terms with tensions that arise between its inherited metaphysical stories and matters unknown or unguessed by its predecessors. Often a story must be revised or even rejected, and a new tale spun to take its place -- one that does justice to the novel facts, and yet makes sense of the world and our place in it. Any metaphysical story worth taking seriously should therefore be contemporary -- it should take full account of the wisdom of the past, certainly, but also of what has changed since then, whether in the world or in our knowledge of it.

In our day, the changes can come all too fast. Stories we told with some confidence just a few years ago may be rendered obsolete by what has happened since. In part, this is because of continuing scientific discoveries, some of them revolutionary, which have a bearing on certain metaphysical questions. Recent developments in astronomy and physics, as we shall see, can have dramatic impact on our ideas about the origins of the universe -- about whether it has always existed or came into being a finite number of years ago, and whether it could have had a spontaneous, uncaused beginning or instead must have had a creator. Discoveries in experimental psychology about how we perceive things, as we shall also see, can affect our ideas about what a thing is, and about why there are any things at all. Recent research into what happens in the brain when we dream may lead us to wonder whether consciousness is a matter simply of what physical states the brain is in. And we shall see how developments in biology might change our minds about the nature of language and linguistic meaning, and also about the origins and justification of morality.

In these and other ways, then, we will be keeping an eye on new departures in the sciences, and on why the would-be metaphysical storyteller should bear them in mind. But scientific change is not the only reason for updating introductions to metaphysics, nor is it by any means always the most important. Developments in literature, the arts, and politics can affect our ideas about the nature of what there is in the world, and indeed about whether there is just one fundamental nature or essence of things in the first place. Widespread rejection of hierarchical, authoritarian political institutions, and of the language of domination and priority, has stimulated many thinkers to reject metaphysics itself, on the ground that metaphysics --any metaphysics -- is inevitably committed to there being a uniquely privileged nature of things, hence to the priority of those institutions and ways of being and speaking that honor it.

Among these antimetaphysical thinkers, one finds the "deconstructionists," as they are called. According to the deconstructionists, the metaphysician's affirmation of priority for some special way of being and talking is really an affirmation of power. This complicity with power and political will is said to reveal a readiness to do violence. The very roots of metaphysics, which metaphysicians deny or repress, include a philosophy of violence that facilitates oppression and totalitarianism. It's as though in tracing the metaphysician's family tree, what one finds is not so much a bunch of horse thieves, as a bunch of imperialistic male chauvinist brutes.

This amounts to an attack on the very idea of metaphysics -- the latest in a long line of attacks. Like most such attacks, this one proves to be based in large part on a theory of what language is and how it works. Thus we shall need to consider the merits of this and other theories of language in light of which metaphysics is supposed to be impossible, pointless, or pernicious. We shall also need to consider whether metaphysics -- any metaphysics -- is inevitably committed to there being just one nature or essence of things and to some unconditionally privileged language in which to talk about it. If, contrary to the deconstructionists and others, there are varieties of metaphysics not committed to any such thing, as I shall suggest, then this most recent attack on the very possibility of metaphysics is wide of the mark. It's as though the posse -- or rather the vigilantes -- had caught and hanged the wrong party.

In addition to new developments in the arts, the sciences and politics, there are new developments in metaphysics itself. One of these has to do with the relation between the being or beings a metaphysician might take as having some deep explanatory significance and all the rest of being or the beings. Metaphysics is often said to be inherently reductive: how everything else is must be reducible to how things are at a deeper level. The metaphysician is to give us a unified picture of the world and our place in it by showing how the many perceptible or manifest ways we and the world can be are determined ultimately by affairs at the deeper level. And the only way the one can be determined by the other, it is said, is by being reducible to it. The many manifest properties of things, ourselves included, must be reducible to properties at the deeper level, in the sense that the manifest properties are really equivalent to collections or compounds of the deeper properties.

But recently some metaphysicians have suggested that metaphysical unification can be nonreductive. There is a unity in the variety, all right, but it is not a reductive unity. The various ways we and the world can be are nonreductively determined by affairs at a deeper level. The key relation here is a relation of nonreductive determination. Thus we shall need to consider just what this relation is supposed to be, how it is supposed to work, and whether, as some of its critics charge, it turns out to be reductive after all.

We'll also need to consider whether talk of unification and determination, even if nonreductive, commits the metaphysician to there being just one nature of things and to some unconditionally privileged language in which to talk about it. Further, we'll need to examine how a relation of nonreductive determination might figure in a metaphysician's account of consciousness, meaning, value, and more. And we shall need to consider what role divinity might play in metaphysical accounts of unity-in-variety. The metaphysical storyteller can hardly afford to ignore what many think is the greatest story of all.

Along the way, we shall encounter some of the great stories metaphysicians have told, from the first metaphysicians to the latest, whether their stories are now but tall tales or sources of continuing insight and inspiration. Perhaps by the end of the book you will feel ready -- and restless -- to begin composing your own account of what, if anything, are the origins, the nature, the meaning, and the unity of all there is, and what our place in it might be. First, however, we must consider whether such an account is even possible, or whether instead metaphysicians are pursuing a delusion. Granddad once said of someone that "he was so drunk he could see peach blossoms on a mesquite tree in January." Are metaphysicians seeing peach blossoms?