Do any of you know any good metaphysical essays by philosophers? I’m looking for more recent ones, not the ancient ones…my teacher told me I should go this way. Work my way backward, recent to older/ancient. Why do you think he said that?
for one thing, the farther back you go, the more difficult the damn things are to read. I found Kant’s writings on metaphysics almost incomprehensible the first time through.
Good modern writers on ontology: Heidegger, Baudrilliard
I don’t mind the difficulty too much, but the quality…
Descartes Meditations will give you the rationalists side of things
If you want the current dope on metaphysics, read “After Philosophy: End or Transformation?” Eds., Baynes, Bohman, McCarthy, MIT Press, 1987.
These are essays by contemporary philosophers as to the future of any philosophy. Most are reactions to Kant who tried to prove that, given pure reason, metaphysics may still be a valid way of thinking. It’s a fun read and quite up to date. It puts metaphysics on the examining table of current thought, not in the morgue of historical varieties of consideration.
that’s cool! I want to read that 
what does it say basically?.
that metaphysics is not a valid way of thinking?
The “After Philosophy Book” presents both sides of the issue and leaves the decision of which is true up to the reader. It’s a Nietzsche vs Kant fun read!
Under the heading “REALITY”
-Michael Dummett - Realism vs Anti-Realism
-Putnam - Why There Isn’t a Ready Made World
-Devitt - A Naturalistic Defense of Realism
Under the heading “TRUTH”
-Tarski - The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics
-Haack - The Pragmatist Theory of Truth
-Rescher - Coherence
-Horwich - Deflationary
-David (Truth as Correspondance especially)
and under the heading “ABSTRACTA”
-Quine - Meaning and Truth and On What There Is
-Carnap - Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology
-Benacerraf - What Numbers Could Not Be
Hopefully that gives you a nice overview of some major topics in Metaphysics…
some new, some old…allllll good…