This is a shockingly new view of 'things' that will revolutionise contemporary ontological debates about substance. What is a thing? What is an object? Tristan Garcia decisively overturns 100 years of Heideggerian orthodoxy about the supposed derivative nature of objects and in so doing provides deep insights about the world and our place in it. Tristan Garcia's original and systematic formal ontology of things strips them of any determination, intensity or depth. From this radical ontological poverty, he develops encyclopaedic regional ontologies of objects. By covering topics as diverse as the universe, events, time, the living, animals, human beings, representation, arts and rules, culture, history, political economy, values, classes, genders, ages of life and death, he shows that speculative metaphysics and ontology are alive and well. It proposes a systematic philosophy essential to the development of metaphysics, the ontology of objects and speculative realism. It combines the analytic and continental traditions, and will appeal to philosophers working on either side.It applies his metaphysics to philosophically charged practical issues such as vegetarianism, animal rights, the nature of representation, death, culture and history.