Lewis's Humean supervenience program demonstrates that rigorous anti-Cartesian, fundamentalist metaphysics remains a live and productive research tradition with no signs of exhaustion.

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Anti-Cartesian(describing the type of metaphysics being discussed): Rejecting the idea (associated with philosopher René Descartes) that the mind is a separate, non-physical thing distinct from the body; instead treating everything, including the mind, as ultimately physical.
Fundamentalist metaphysics(the type of metaphysical approach Lewis uses): A philosophical approach that tries to explain everything in the world by starting from the most basic, smallest building blocks (like atoms and forces) and showing how everything else is made from them.
Humean Supervenience(Lewis's metaphysical doctrine): The doctrine that there are intrinsic properties which need nothing bigger than a point to be instantiated, and that there is no difference without a difference in the arrangement of intrinsic properties over points
Lewis(philosopher who created the similarity metric being discussed): David Lewis was a famous American philosopher who developed influential theories about possible worlds—alternative ways reality could have been.
Research tradition(as used in describing scholarly fields): An ongoing line of study where scholars build on each other's work over time, developing shared methods and goals.
metaphysics(Hartshorne's naturalistic redefinition of metaphysics): On Hartshorne's view, the study not of realities beyond the physical, but of features of reality that are ubiquitous or that would exist in any possible world.

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