ABSTRACT
Throughout the twentieth century philosophers commonly asserted, with or without argument, that metaphysics was dead and buried. Towards the end of the century, however, signs emerged that metaphysics had never died after all, and many philosophers were once more not only doing metaphysics but explicitly owning up to it. “Truthmaker theories” hold that in order for any truthbearer to be true there must be something “outside the text,” as people might say, that “makes” it true. If the truth is a truth about inanimate objects, then the world must contain those inanimate objects; if it is about a God then there must be a God; if it is about the way people conduct their lives, then there must be people and they must conduct their lives in that way; and so on. Truthmaker theses have also been used in justifying various species of metaphysical realism, of either Platonist or Aristotelian varieties, that affirm the existence of both “individuals” and "universals".
