Metaphysics

One of my tasks for this summer was to prepare for a new course that I'm teaching in the fall: Metaphysics (departmental description here, then scroll down).  The faculty member who taught this course in past years, now retired, tended to teach it historically (e.g., pre-Socratics on the one/many, Plato on the Forms, Descartes on mind/body, etc...).  I learned from talking to a number of our majors that, given the required courses in the history of philosophy for the major, many (most?) of the issues covered where ones they had already encountered in earlier courses.  So I've been looking forward to building the course as one in contemporary metaphysics. 

I'd hope to get the majority of my notes for the lectures prepared this summer, but I'm quite sure now that that's not going to happen.  I did finish up the first draft of the syllabus this morning (available

here

--comments welcome).   We're going to be using Lowe's recent introduction to metaphysics text, which I think is quite nice, supplementing it with quite a few seminal primary texts on related issues (e.g., this and this). 

I'm going to try two new methodological approaches in this course.  First, while I've required substantial writing in past courses, I'm going to devote part of this course to teach students philosophical writing, in part by using Vaugn's good volume on the topic.

Second, I was really intrigued by Nadalhoffer and Nahmias' recent article on "Polling as Pedagogy," and so am going to devote a number of class periods to some thought-experiments and exercises meant to get students thinking about certain metaphysical issues before we read the chapters on those issues.  (Two of the exercises are

here 

and

here

.)

Thoughts or suggestions for improvement are welcome.