Reality comprises everything there is. It is not the province solely of specialists, but is well known to all. Everything is part of it: the gardener and her tulips, the prisoner and his chains, the cook and his food processor are all real things that should be included in a complete account of what there is. The aim of The Metaphysics of Everyday Life is to present a theory that focuses on the familiar objects that we encounter every day – flowers, people, houses, and so on – and locates them irreducibly in reality.

Let us begin with a distinction between manifest objects of everyday life (roses, chairs, dollar bills, etc.) and the underlying objects that we can hope that physics will tell us about. Suppose that the underlying objects are collections of particles. I want to defend a metaphysics that gives ontological weight to the manifest objects of everyday life. This view is an alternative to contemporary metaphysical theories that take ordinary things to be “really” just collections of particles. Such theories then have to answer the question – How do we account for the fact that, if your lover and your prize roses, say, are “really” just collections of particles, they seem to be a person and and a plant, and do not seem like just collections of particles? One attempted answer is that we simply choose to employ concepts like “person” and “plant” to refer to certain collections of particles.