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KOONS, Robert C. and Timothy Pickavance. The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics. Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. XV + 699 pp. Cloth, $195.00-This is not so much a guide to metaphysics as it is a review of a major school of philosophy in the English-speaking world of the twentieth century. There is hardly any important conversation among analytic philosophers that is not somehow represented in the book as familiar topics are discussed. Most of the topics date to antiquity, but they are treated without any reference to their discussion over the centuries if not millennia.
The term "metaphysics" dates to Aristotle's theory of reality. For Aristotle, being is wider than the being of sense experience. There is physics, the study of nature, and the most general account of nature is what may be called a philosophy of nature. Aristotle in reasoning to an immaterial order of being shows that the most general account of...