PHI3500 Metaphysics is the study of what there is — not what we know about it, but what exists and what its fundamental nature is.
The course is offered at approximately five Florida institutions, including Florida A&M University, Florida International University, the University of Florida, the University of North Florida and the University of West Florida.
The University of West Florida places it in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of History and Philosophy at 3 semester hours, with a catalog description written in an unusually plain and inviting register: "Metaphysics is the study of everything. Hence this course is about all the stuff in the universe, and perhaps even some stuff not in the universe... metaphysicians worry about not just what the actual furniture of the universe is, but what are the possible kinds of furniture that may populate the universe." It then names the questions directly: do you have free will? Do you have a mind? Do numbers exist? Is time travel possible? What is time, anyway? Florida International University describes it as an introductory course examining basic metaphysical questions regarding the nature of reality, as well as the meaning of these questions for the relationship of persons with their world, drawing on fundamental texts from classical and contemporary philosophers.
The two descriptions differ in emphasis in a way worth flagging. UWF's is problem-driven and contemporary — a list of live questions in analytic metaphysics, approached directly. FIU's is text-driven and historical, working through classical and contemporary sources. Both are standard ways to teach the subject and both cover the same territory, but they feel quite different from inside: one is closer to a seminar arguing about time travel, the other closer to a reading course. Neither approach is a different subject, and credit transfers normally.
What makes metaphysics distinctive is that its questions cannot be settled by observation. Whether numbers exist, whether the past is as real as the present, whether you are the same person you were at five years old — no experiment decides these, and yet they are not meaningless, and people have made real progress on them by argument. That combination is what draws students in and what frustrates them.
The subject's reputation for abstraction is partly deserved and partly a misunderstanding. Some of it genuinely is abstract: the debate over universals, whether properties are entities in their own right. But a great deal of it is about things students already care about. Free will is a metaphysical question and it bears directly on moral responsibility, punishment and blame. Personal identity is a metaphysical question and it bears on what happens to you under anaesthesia, in dementia, or across a lifetime of change. The nature of time is a metaphysical question and it is one physicists and philosophers are actively arguing about together.
⚠ Two courses in Florida philosophy departments cover metaphysics, and they are not the same course. This one — PHI3500, and its 4000-level counterpart at some institutions — is the topic course. PHI3300 Knowledge and Belief (epistemology) is its companion: metaphysics asks what exists, epistemology asks how we could know. Most philosophy majors require both, and they are frequently taught back to back.
Metaphysics is the least vocational course in a discipline that is not vocational. Its value in a career is in the reasoning it trains — sustained analysis of a problem where the terms themselves are in dispute — and the destinations below reflect that.
Florida State University numbers its metaphysics course PHI4500, not PHI3500, and describes it as "critical consideration of recent philosophical work from a variety of points of view on the question of what exists; for example: matter, mind, time, space, universal properties, causes, and essences." That is the same course.
This matters because the Statewide Course Numbering System articulates on the number. A course carried as PHI3500 at one institution and PHI4500 at another does not articulate automatically — SCNS treats different numbers as different courses even when the content is identical, and it makes no exception for a level difference within the same subject.
⚠ Practical consequence. If you take metaphysics at UWF, FIU or UF and transfer to FSU, or the reverse, expect to file a course substitution rather than to see the credit apply on its own. Keep your syllabus. The substitution is normally granted — the descriptions are plainly the same course — but it will not happen automatically, and finding out during a graduation check is the expensive way to discover it.
This is the same failure mode this project has documented elsewhere (see the MUT3311/MUT4311 case): content agreement does not produce articulation; number agreement does.
FIU's catalog carries this number under two titles — "Metaphysics" and "What Is Reality?" — the second evidently a general-education-facing rename of the same course. The description is the metaphysics course either way. If your transcript shows "What Is Reality?", it is this course, and it is worth saying so explicitly on a substitution request, because a transfer evaluator reading the title alone could reasonably fail to recognise it.
Neither UWF nor FIU lists a prerequisite, and FIU explicitly calls the course introductory. That is genuine — this course does not assume prior philosophy.
⚠ But "introductory" describes the assumed background, not the difficulty. The material is conceptually demanding from the first week, and the absence of a prerequisite means students arrive with very different preparation. An introductory philosophy course (PHI2010) and logic (PHI3130) are both genuinely useful: the first supplies the vocabulary and the practice of reading philosophically, the second supplies argument reconstruction, which is the operational skill the whole course runs on.
In a philosophy major the course usually sits in the junior year, paired with epistemology (PHI3300). It is also a common elective for students in mathematics, computer science, physics and religious studies, and it attracts them for good reasons — the questions about numbers, computation, time and necessity connect directly to those fields.
3 credits, 45 contact hours — lecture and discussion, three hours per week. Discussion is a larger share of the class than in most courses, because the material is argued rather than delivered.
Expect 6–9 hours per week outside class. The reading is not long — a journal article a week is common — but a twenty-page paper in this literature is slow going and typically needs two passes. Assessment is normally two or three essays, sometimes with short response papers, occasionally with examinations.
⚠ The essays are graded on argument, not on position. You will not lose marks for defending compatibilism, or for attacking it. You will lose marks for defending either one without engaging the strongest objection to it. Students used to being graded on content coverage frequently misjudge the first essay.
PHI3500 is a 3000-level upper-division course. It is not taught at Florida College System institutions, so it is taken after transfer, and it is not part of the A.A. general-education core.
Within Florida, the number is used consistently at FAMU, FIU, UF, UNF and UWF. FSU is the exception noted above and is the one to plan around.
⚠ Prefix note. PHI is philosophy by topic; PHH is history of philosophy; PHM is social and political philosophy; PHP is the philosophy of individual philosophers. A major's requirements normally draw from several of these, and they do not substitute for one another — a PHH course will not satisfy a PHI topic requirement.
Metaphysics has an unusual relationship with AI tools, and it runs in both directions.
As a subject, the course has become more relevant, not less. Questions that were once purely academic are now being asked operationally by people building and regulating systems: what makes something a person, what makes an agent responsible for an outcome, whether identity survives duplication, whether a system that behaves as if it understands does understand. The teletransportation and fission cases in the personal-identity literature are no longer only thought experiments about metaphysics; they are the conceptual apparatus people reach for when arguing about copying, continuity and agency in software systems. Students in this course should know that this material has become directly applicable, because it is one of the few places where an abstract philosophy course turns out to be vocational after all.
As a tool, use it carefully. Language models are competent at explaining a standard position — what compatibilism claims, how presentism differs from eternalism — and that is useful when a lecture went past too quickly. They are also reasonable at generating objections to a thesis you have written, which is the hardest part of a philosophy essay to do alone.
Where they fail is specific and predictable. Models average across the literature, so they reproduce the consensus summary of a debate rather than a defensible position within it. They are poor at holding a novel argument steady over several steps. They fabricate citations and misattribute positions — attributing an argument to Lewis that belongs to Sider, or inventing a paper title that sounds right. And they will happily produce a fluent, plausible, entirely unoriginal essay that engages nothing.
⚠ The specific risk in this course is that fluent metaphysical prose is easy to generate and hard to distinguish from thought at a glance — but not at a second glance. Graders read for whether the argument moves. An essay assembled from a model's summary states positions and does not move, and that is visible to anyone who reads the field.
Academic integrity. Policies vary by institution and instructor; read the syllabus and ask if it is unclear. Submitting model-generated prose as your own violates every Florida institution's policy. Using a model to check whether your reconstruction of an argument is accurate, or to find the standard objection to a position you are defending, may be entirely acceptable. The line most philosophy instructors draw is between using a tool to sharpen your reasoning and using it to replace your reasoning — and in this discipline the reasoning is the entire deliverable.
Generated September 7, 2026 · Updated September 7, 2026