Why were you initially drawn to metaphysics (and what keeps you interested)?

When I was starting out in philosophy, when I was, so to speak, beginning to be a philosopher, I should have described my interests as centered not on “metaphysics” but on certain philosophical problems: the problem of free will and determinism, the problem of fictional existence, the nature of modality. As time passed, however, I began to use the term ‘metaphysics’ to tie the members of this rather diverse set of problems together. (As I became interested in further problems – the nature of material objects and their relations to their parts, the problem of identity across time, the problem of nominalism and realism – I continued to use the word ‘metaphysics’ as a general term to tie the problems I was interested in together. I do not think that I became interested in these further problems because someone had classified them as belonging to “metaphysics.”) But why did I use that word? This is a hard question to answer because it is not at all clear what it means to classify a philosophical problem as metaphysical. I had long been aware that ‘metaphysics’ and ‘metaphysical’ were problematical terms, but I did not fully appreciate how problematical they were till a few years ago when I began to write the article “Metaphysics” for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.