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Metaphysics - an overview of metaphysics
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Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the
ultimate nature of reality, being, and the world.[1] Its name derives
from the Greek words μετά (metá) (meaning "after") and φυσικά (physiká)
(meaning "those on nature"), "those on nature" referring to those works
on nature by Aristotle in antiquity.[2] Metaphysics addresses questions
that have existed for as long as the human race - many still with no
definitive answer. Examples are:
* What is the meaning of life?
* What is the nature of reality?
* What is mankind's place in the universe?
* Are colors objective or subjective?
* Does the world exist outside the mind?
* What is the nature of objects, events, places?
A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into what
types of things there are in the world and what relations these things
bear to one another. The metaphysician also attempts to clarify the
notions by which people understand the world, including existence,
objecthood, property, space, time, causality, and possibility.
More recently, the term "metaphysics" has also been used more loosely to
refer to "subjects that are beyond the physical world". A "metaphysical
bookstore", for instance, is not one that sells books on ontology, but
rather one that sells books on spirits, faith healing, crystal power,
occultism, and other such topics.
Before the development of modern science, scientific questions were
addressed as a part of metaphysics known as "natural philosophy"; the
term "science" itself meant "knowledge". The Scientific Revolution,
however, made natural philosophy an empirical and experimental activity
unlike the rest of philosophy, and by the end of the eighteenth century
it had begun to be called "science" in order to distinguish it from
philosophy. Metaphysics therefore became the philosophical enquiry into
subjects beyond the physical world. Natural philosophy and science may
still be considered topics of metaphysics, if the definition of
"metaphysics" includes empirical explanations.
History of metaphysics
Referred to as the subject of "first philosophy", the term "metaphysics"
is regarded as having originated from the works of Aristotle. The editor
of his works, Andronicus of Rhodes, placed the books on first philosophy
right after another work, Physics, and called these books τα μετα τα
φυσικά βιβλια (ta meta ta physika biblia) or, "the books that come after
the [books on] physics." This was misread by Latin scholiasts, who
thought it meant "the science of what is beyond the physical." In the
English language, the word comes by way of the Medieval Latin
metaphysica, the neuter plural of Medieval Greek metaphysika.[3] While
its Greek and Latin origins are clear, various dictionaries trace its
first appearance in English to the mid-sixteenth century, although in
some cases as early as 1387.[3][4]
Aristotle's Metaphysics was divided into three parts, in addition to
some smaller sections related to a philosophical lexicon and some
reprinted extracts from the Physics, which are now regarded as the
proper branches of traditional Western metaphysics:
Ontology
The study of Being and existence; includes the definition and
classification of entities, physical or mental, the nature of their
properties, and the nature of change.
Theology
The study of God; involves many topics, including among others the
nature of religion and the world, existence of the divine, questions
about Creation, and the numerous religious or spiritual issues that
concern humankind in general.
Universal science
The study of first principles, which Aristotle believed to be the
foundation of all other inquiries. An example of such a principle is the
law of noncontradiction and the status it holds in non-paraconsistent
logics.
Universal science or first philosophy treats of "being qua being" — that
is, what is basic to all science before one adds the particular details
of any one science. Essentially "being qua being" may be translated as
"being insofar as being goes", or as, "being in terms of being". This
includes topics such as causality, substance, species and elements, as
well as the notions of relation, interaction, and finitude.
Metaphysics as a discipline was a central part of academic inquiry and
scholarly education even before the age of Aristotle. Long considered
"the Queen of Sciences",[cite this quote] its issues were considered no
less important than the other main formal subjects of physical science,
medicine, mathematics, poetics and music. Since the beginning of modern
philosophy during the seventeenth century, problems that were not
originally considered within the bounds of metaphysical have been added
to its purview, while other problems considered metaphysical for
centuries are now typically relegated to their own separate regions in
philosophy, such as philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind,
philosophy of perception, philosophy of language, and philosophy of
science.
In some cases, subjects of metaphysical scholarship have been found to
be entirely physical and natural, thus making them part of physics
proper (cf. Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity).
Central questions of metaphysics
Most positions that can be taken with regards to any of the following
questions are endorsed by one or another notable philosopher. It is
often difficult to frame the questions in a non-controversial manner.
Mind and matter
The nature of matter was a problem in its own right in early philosophy.
Aristotle himself introduced the idea of matter in general to the
Western world, adapting the term hyle which originally meant "lumber".
Early debates centered on identifying a single underlying principle.
Water was claimed by Thales, Air by Anaximenes, Apeiron (the Boundless)
by Anaximander, Fire by Heraclitus. Democritus conceived an atomic
theory many centuries before it became scientifically accepted.
Philosophers now look to empirical science for insights into the nature
of matter.
The nature of the mind and its relation to the body has been seen as
more of a problem as science has progressed in its mechanistic
understanding of the brain and body. Proposed solutions often have
ramifications about the nature of reality as a whole. René Descartes
proposed substance dualism, a theory in which mind and body are
essentially quite different, with the mind having some of the attributes
traditionally assigned to the soul, in the seventeenth century. This
creates a conceptual puzzle about how the two interact (which has
received some strange answers, such as occasionalism). Evidence of a
close relationship between brain and mind, such as the Phineas Gage
case, have made this form of dualism increasingly unpopular.
Another proposal discussing the mind-body problem is idealism, in which
the material is sweepingly eliminated in favor of the mental. Idealists,
such as George Berkeley, claim that material objects do not exist unless
perceived and only as perceptions. The "German idealists" such as
Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer took Kant as their starting-point,
although it is debatable how much of an idealist Kant himself was.
Idealism is also a common theme in Eastern philosophy. Related ideas are
panpsychism and panexperientialism which say everything has a mind
rather than everything exists in a mind. Alfred North Whitehead was a
twentieth-century exponent of this approach.
Idealism is a monistic theory, in which there is a single universal
substance or principles. Neutral monism, associated in different forms
with Baruch Spinoza and Bertrand Russell is a theory which seeks to be
less extreme than idealism, and to avoid the problems of substance
dualism. It claims that existence consists of a single substance, which
in itself is neither mental nor physical, but is capable of mental and
physical aspects or attributes – thus it implies a dual-aspect theory.
For the last one hundred years, the dominant metaphysics has without a
doubt been materialistic monism. Science has demonstrated many ways in
which mind and brain interact, but the exact nature of the relationship
is still open to debate. Type identity theory, token identity theory,
functionalism, reductive physicalism, nonreductive physicalism,
eliminative materialism, anomolous monism, property dualism,
epiphenomenalism and emergence are just some of the candidates for a
scientifically-informed account of the mind. (It should be noted that
while many of these positions are dualisms, none of them are substance
dualism.)
Prominent recent philosophers of mind include David Armstrong, Ned
Block, David Chalmers, Patricia and Paul Churchland, Donald Davidson,
Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, David Lewis, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam,
John Searle, John Smart and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Objects and their properties
The world seems to contain many individual things, both physical, like
apples, and abstract such as love, democracy, and the number 3. Such
objects are called particulars. Now, consider two apples. There seem to
be many ways in which those two apples are similar, they may be
approximately the same size, or shape, or color. They are both fruit,
etc. One might also say that the two apples seem to have some thing or
things in common. Universals or Properties are said to be those things.
Metaphysicians working on questions about universals or particulars are
interested in the nature of objects and their properties, and the
relationship between the two. For instance, one might hold that
properties are abstract objects, existing outside of space and time, to
which particular objects bear special relations. Others maintain that
what particulars are is a bundle or collection of properties
(specifically, a bundle of properties they have).
Identity and change
Main article: Identity and change
See also: Identity (philosophy) and Philosophy of space and time
The Greeks took some extreme positions on the nature of change:
Parmenides denied that change occurs at all, while Heracleitus thought
change was ubiquitous: "[Y]ou cannot step into the same river twice".
Identity, sometimes called Numerical Identity, is the relation that a
"thing" bears to itself, and which no "thing" bears to anything other
than itself (cf. sameness). According to Leibniz, if some object x is
identical to some object y, then any property that x has, y will have as
well. However, it seems, too, that objects can change over time. If one
were to look at a tree one day, and the tree later lost a leaf, it would
seem that one could still be looking at that same tree. Two rival
theories to account for the relationship between change and identity are
Perdurantism, which treats the tree as a series of tree-stages, and
Endurantism which maintains that the tree -- the same tree -- is present
at every stage in its history.
Space and time
A traditional realist position in ontology is that time and space have
existence apart from the human mind. Idealists, including Kant claim
that space and time are mental constructs used to organise perceptions,
or are otherwise unreal.
Suppose that one is sitting at a table, with an apple in front of him or
her; the apple exists in space and in time, but what does this statement
indicate? Could it be said, for example, that space is like an invisible
three-dimensional grid in which the apple is positioned? Suppose the
apple, and all physical objects in the universe, were removed from
existence entirely. Would space as an "invisible grid" still exist? René
Descartes and Leibniz believed it would not, arguing that without
physical objects, "space" would be meaningless because space is the
framework upon which we understand how physical objects are related to
each other. Newton, on the other hand, argued for an absolute
"container" space. The pendulum swung back to relational space with
Einstein and Ernst Mach.
While the absolute/relative debate, and the realism debate are equally
applicable to time and space, time presents some special problems of its
own. The flow of time has been denied in ancient times by Parmenides and
more recently by J. M. E. McTaggart in his paper The Unreality of Time.
The direction of time, also known as "time's arrow", is also a puzzle,
although physics is now driving the debate rather than philosophy. It
appears that fundamental laws are time-reversible and the arrow of time
must be an "emergent" phenomenon, perhaps explained by a statistical
understanding of thermodynamic entropy.
Common-sense tells us that objects persist across time, that there is
some sense in which you are the same person you were yesterday, in which
the oak is the same as the acorn, in which you perhaps even can step
into the same river twice. Philosophers have developed two rival
theories for how this happens, called "endurantism" and "perdurantism".
Broadly speaking, endurantists hold that a whole object exists at each
moment of its history, and the same object exists at each moment.
Perdurantists believe that objects are four-dimensional entities made up
of a series of temporal parts like the frames of a movie.
Religion and spirituality
Theology is the study of God and of questions about the Nature of a
Divine. Assertions for the existence of God (monotheism) or not
(atheism)? Does the Divine intervene (theism), or not (deism)? Are God
and the World different or identical (pantheism, monism)?
Metaphysics can be practised within a theological framework, for
instance scholasticism; alternatively, theological questions can be
considered from a metaphysical perspective.
Necessity and possibility
Metaphysicians investigate questions about the ways the world could have
been. David Lewis, in "On the Plurality of Worlds," endorsed a view
called Concrete Modal realism, according to which facts about how things
could have been are made true by other concrete worlds, just like ours,
in which things are different. Other philosophers, such as Gottfried
Leibniz, have dealt with the idea of possible worlds as well. The idea
of necessity is that any necessary fact is true across all possible
worlds; that is, we could not imagine it to be otherwise. A possible
fact is one that is true in some possible world, even if not in the
actual world. For example, it is possible that cats could have had two
tails, or that any particular apple could have not existed. By contrast,
certain propositions seem necessarily true, such as analytic
propositions, e.g. "All bachelors are unmarried." The particular example
of analytic truth being necessary is not universally held among
philosophers. A less controversial view might be that self-identity is
necessary, as it seems fundamentally incoherent to claim that for any x,
it is not identical to itself; this is known as the principle of
contradiction. Aristotle describes the principle of contradiction, "It
is impossible that the same quality should both belong and not belong to
the same thing . . . This is the most certain of all principles . . .
Wherefore they who demonstrate refer to this as an ultimate opinion. For
it is by nature the source of all the other axioms."
Abstract objects and mathematics
Some philosophers endorse views according to which there are abstract
objects such as numbers, or Universals. (Universals are properties that
can be instantiated by multiple objects, such as redness or squareness.)
Abstract objects are generally regarded as being outside of space and
time, and/or as being causally inert. Mathematical objects and fictional
entities and worlds are often given as examples of abstract objects. The
view that there really are no abstract objects is called nominalism.
Realism about such objects is exemplified by Platonism. Other positions
include moderate realism, as espoused by Aristotle, and conceptualism.
The philosophy of mathematics overlaps with metaphysics because some
positions are realistic in the sense that they hold that mathematical
objects really exist, whether transcendentally, physically, or mentally.
Platonic realism holds that mathematical entities are a transcendent
realm of non-physical objects. The simplest form of mathematical
empiricism claims that mathematical objects are just ordinary physical
objects, i.e. that squares and the like physically exist. Plato rejected
this view, among other reasons, because geometrical figures in
mathematics have a perfection that no physical instantiation can
capture. Modern mathematicians have developed many strange and complex
mathematical structures with no counterparts in observable reality,
further undermining this view. The third main form of realism holds that
mathematical entities exist in the mind. However, given a materialistic
conception of the mind, it does not have the capacity to literally
contain the many infinities of objects in mathematics. Intuitionism,
inspired by Kant, sticks with the idea that "there are no
non-experienced mathematical truths". This involves rejecting as
intuitionistically unacceptable anything that cannot be held in the mind
or explicitly constructed. Intuitionists reject the law of the excluded
middle and are suspicious of infinity, particularly of transfinite
numbers.
Other positions such as formalism and fictionalism that do not attribute
any existence to mathematical entities are anti-realist.
Determinism and free will
Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including
human cognition, decision and action, is causally determined by an
unbroken chain of prior occurrences. It holds that no random,
spontaneous, mysterious, or miraculous events occur. The principal
consequence of the deterministic claim is that it poses a challenge to
the existence of free will.
The problem of free will is the problem of whether rational agents
exercise control over their own actions and decisions. Addressing this
problem requires understanding the relation between freedom and
causation, and determining whether the laws of nature are causally
deterministic. Some philosophers, known as Incompatibilists, view
determinism and free will as mutually exclusive. If they believe in
determinism, they will therefore believe free will to be an illusion, a
position known as Hard Determinism. Proponents range from Baruch Spinoza
to Ted Honderich.
Others, labeled Compatibilists (or "Soft Determinists"), believe that
the two ideas can be coherently reconciled. Adherents of this view
include Thomas Hobbes and many modern philosophers.
Incompatibilists who accept free will but reject determinism are called
Libertarians, a term not to be confused with the political sense. Robert
Kane is one of the few modern defenders of this theory.
It is a popular misconception that determinism necessarily entails that
humanity or individual humans have no influence on the future and its
events, a position known as Fatalism). Determinists, however, believe
that the level to which human beings have influence over their future is
itself dependent on present and past.
Cosmology and cosmogony
Cosmology is the branch of metaphysics that deals with the world as the
totality of all phenomena in space and time. Historically, it has had
quite a broad scope, and in many cases was founded in religion. The
ancient Greeks did not draw a distinction between this use and their
model for the cosmos. However, in modern use it addresses questions
about the Universe which are beyond the scope of science. It is
distinguished from religious cosmology in that it approaches these
questions using philosophical methods (e.g. dialectics). Cosmogony deals
specifically with the origin of the universe.
Modern metaphysical cosmology and cosmogony try to address questions
such as:
* What is the origin of the Universe? What is its first cause? Is its
existence necessary? (see monism, pantheism, emanationism and
creationism)
* What are the ultimate material components of the Universe? (see
mechanism, dynamism, hylomorphism, atomism)
* What is the ultimate reason for the existence of the Universe? Does
the cosmos have a purpose? (see teleology)
Criticism
Metaphysics has been attacked, at different times in history, as being
futile and overly vague. David Hume went so far as to write:
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics,
for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning
concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental
reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to
the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
– An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Immanuel Kant prescribed a limited role to the subject and argued
against knowledge progressing beyond the world of our representations,
except to knowledge that the noumena exist:
...though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must
yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves;
otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be
appearance without anything that appears.
– Critique of Pure Reason pp. Bxxvi-xxvii
A.J. Ayer is famous for leading a "revolt against metaphysics," where he
claimed that its propositions were meaningless in his book "Language,
Truth and Logic". British universities became less concerned with the
area for much of the 20th century. However, metaphysics has seen a
reemergence in recent times amongst philosophy departments.
A more nuanced view is that metaphysical statements are not meaningless
statements, but rather that they are generally not fallible, testable or
provable statements (see Karl Popper). That is to say, there is no valid
set of empirical observations nor a valid set of logical arguments,
which could definitively prove metaphysical statements to be true or
false. Hence, a metaphysical statement usually implies an idea about the
world or about the universe, which may seem reasonable but is ultimately
not empirically verifiable. That idea could be changed in a
non-arbitrary way, based on experience or argument, yet there exists no
evidence or argument so compelling that it could rationally force a
change in that idea, in the sense of definitely proving it false.
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