All Metaphysics

Philosophers whose primary and best-known contribution concerns the fundamental nature of reality: being, substance, causation, universals, the mind-body relation broadly construed, cosmology and the nature of the self. Belongs here: philosophers principally remembered for an account of what there is and what grounds it, from the Presocratics through German Idealism, Vedanta, Neoplatonism and the foundational ontology of phenomenology. Does not belong here: philosophers whose central legacy is a theory of knowledge, grouped under Epistemology, of right action, grouped under Ethics, of valid inference, grouped under Logic, or of the state and political obligation, grouped under Political Philosophy, even where a metaphysical position underlies work better known in one of those fields.