What is metaphysics?

Metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality. If you happen to ask yourself question like "Am I the same person I was yesterday?", or "does time really passes", or again "what is consciousness?" then you are engaging with metaphysical questions. Unlike scientific questions, that address specific kind of entities such as biological or physical, metaphysical questions cover a more broad area of interest, being focused on how things are in general. Unlike the scientific enterprise, whose method is mainly based on experimenting and dealing with empirical evidence, metaphysical, and more generally philosophical investigations use arguments –a series of statements presenting reasons to defend or criticise a claim– method for discovery. Unsurprisingly, there is little agreement about what is the best answer to our question. This is because "what is metaphysics?" is itself a metaphysical question; more specifically, is the question of "what are we doing when we do metaphysics?". In the last century, philosophers look at metaphysics as a mean to understand what, in reality, exist and what does not exist. Metaphysical questions were thus associated with questions like "does number exists?", or "do negative entities, like holes or shadows, exist?". However, more recently, philosophers started to include questions about grounding and dependence into the basket of metaphysical questions. Their interest is not so much over the entities that exist, but, provided they do, how they exist, or what makes them exist in the way they do. So, while the first approach focused on listing entities in reality, the latter started to explore the structure of reality, that is, how these entities are connected together.