what does metaphysics actually mean? course hero

by Tevin Blick 3 min read

What is metaphysics in philosophy?

About the Title. Metaphysics literally means "after the physics." This title was not used by Aristotle but was added by a later commentator who, it is widely believed, compiled the work from shorter essays sometime in the 1st century CE.

Who coined the term metaphysics?

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What is the subject matter of metaphysics?

4 metaphysics it comes from the greek words meta. 4. METAPHYSICS – it comes from the Greek words “meta” which means beyond and “physikon” which means nature. - It is branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of ultimate reality. 5.

What is metaphysical study?

Metaphysics is a term from philosophy, dating back over 2,000 years to Aristotle. His book “Metaphysics” was designedto be readafter his “Physics” book. “Meta” actually means “after” What’s the relationship between Science and Metaphysics? …

The Socratic Tradition

Aristotle is, in a sense, the direct intellectual descendant of Socrates, who is often called the father of Western philosophy. Though none of his own writings survive, Socrates exerted a massive influence on several major branches of philosophy.

The Corpus Aristotelicum

Like Plato and unlike Socrates, Aristotle left behind an extensive body of philosophical writings. Plato's surviving works, however, are mostly exoteric: they are meant to introduce and explain philosophical topics to educated members of the public.

Metaphysics after Aristotle

It might seem that an ancient work entitled The Metaphysics should, at a minimum, clarify what metaphysics is. However, millennia after Aristotle lived and wrote, the definition of the subject remains elusive, partly because his Metaphysics embraces such a wide range of topics.

How to explain metaphysics?

Here are the 6 broad topics to explain metaphysics in simple terms: 1. Ontology. Ontology is the study of being. And, anything that exists is a being. Keeping it super simple, let’s use the example of the table in your kitchen.

Who called metaphysics?

Who termed metaphysics? Metaphysics is a term from philosophy, dating back over 2,000 years to Aristotle . His book “Metaphysics” was designed to be read after his “Physics” book. “Meta” actually means “after”

What is metaphysics in philosophy?

In the definition found in most dictionaries, metaphysics is referred to as a branch of philosophy that deals with first cause and the nature of being. It is taught as a branch of philosophy in most academic universities under the label of “Speculative Philosophy.”.

Where did metaphysics come from?

Traditionally, the word Metaphysics comes to us from Ancient Greece, where it was a combination of two words – Meta, meaning over and beyond – and physics. Thus, the combination means over and beyond physics. In the definition found in most dictionaries, metaphysics is referred to as a branch of philosophy that deals with first cause and ...

What is the study of ultimate cause?

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that studies the ultimate nature of existence, reality, and experience without being bound to any one theological doctrine or dogma. Metaphysics includes all religions but transcends them all. Metaphysics is the study of ultimate cause in the Universe.

What is the New Thought movement?

New Thought: A Metaphysically Oriented Movement. Because of a commonly shared spiritual philosophy held by Unity, Religious Science, and many independents, the term New Thought was adopted to denote a religious movement. The basic premise was that everything is one vast universal mind, the human mind and body included.

What is the meaning of unity?

Unity symbolizes love, and love is the spirit of Universal Intelligence, or God. —Dr. Paul Leon Masters. The Presence of Universal Mind, or God-Mind, is in you right this moment, ...

What is the purpose of life on Earth?

What is My Purpose: “The purpose of life on Earth basically is to express the One Intelligence that has taken image, shape, form, and embodiment in each and every one of us. Think of it as a giant diamond that covers the entirety of infinity that is glistening from an inner light that it gives off and each one of us is like a facet ...

What is metaphysics in philosophy?

v. t. e. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter.

What are the topics of metaphysics?

Topics of metaphysical investigation include existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics.

What are the questions that metaphysics asks?

Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and fully general manner, the questions: 1 What is there? 2 What is it like?

Who coined the term "metaphysics"?

It has been suggested that the term might have been coined by a first century CE editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle ’s works into the treatise we now know by the name Metaphysics (μετὰ τὰ φυσικά, meta ta physika, lit. 'after the Physics ', another of Aristotle 's works).

Who wrote the critique of pure reason?

Thirty-three years after Hume's Enquiry appeared, Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason. Although he followed Hume in rejecting much of previous metaphysics, he argued that there was still room for some synthetic a priori knowledge, concerned with matters of fact yet obtainable independent of experience.

What is metaphysical cosmology?

Metaphysical cosmology is the branch of metaphysics that deals with the world as the totality of all phenomena in space and time. Historically, it formed a major part of the subject alongside Ontology, though its role is more peripheral in contemporary philosophy.

What was science before philosophy?

Prior to the modern history of science, scientific questions were addressed as a part of natural philosophy. Originally, the term "science" ( Latin: scientia) simply meant "knowledge". The scientific method, however, transformed natural philosophy into an empirical activity deriving from experiment, unlike the rest of philosophy. By the end of the 18th century, it had begun to be called "science" to distinguish it from other branches of philosophy. Science and philosophy have been considered separated disciplines ever since. Thereafter, metaphysics denoted philosophical enquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.

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What is metaphysics in philosophy?

Twentieth-century coinages like ‘meta-language’ and ‘metaphilosophy’ encourage the impression that metaphysics is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study devoted to matters that transcend the mundane concerns of Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken. The word ‘metaphysics’ is derived from a collective title of the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think of as making up Aristotle's Metaphysics. Aristotle himself did not know the word. (He had four names for the branch of philosophy that is the subject-matter of Metaphysics: ‘first philosophy’, ‘first science’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘theology’.) At least one hundred years after Aristotle's death, an editor of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of Rhodes) titled those fourteen books “ Ta meta ta phusika ”—“the after the physicals” or “the ones after the physical ones”—the “physical ones” being the books contained in what we now call Aristotle's Physics. The title was probably meant to warn students of Aristotle's philosophy that they should attempt Metaphysics only after they had mastered “the physical ones”, the books about nature or the natural world—that is to say, about change, for change is the defining feature of the natural world.

What is the subject matter of metaphysics?

The subject-matter of metaphysics is the first causes of things. The subject-matter of metaphysics is that which does not change. Any of these three theses might have been regarded as a defensible statement of the subject-matter of what was called ‘metaphysics’ until the seventeenth century.

What are the problems of metaphysics?

If metaphysics now considers a wider range of problems than those studied in Aristotle's Metaphysics, those original problems continue to belong to its subject-matter. For instance, the topic of “being as such” (and “existence as such”, if existence is something other than being) is one of the matters that belong to metaphysics on any conception of metaphysics. The following theses are all paradigmatically metaphysical: 1 “Being is; not-being is not” [Parmenides]; 2 “Essence precedes existence” [Avicenna, paraphrased]; 3 “Existence in reality is greater than existence in the understanding alone” [St Anselm, paraphrased]; 4 “Existence is a perfection” [Descartes, paraphrased]; 5 “Being is a logical, not a real predicate” [Kant, paraphrased]; 6 “Being is the most barren and abstract of all categories” [Hegel, paraphrased]; 7 “Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number zero” [Frege]; 8 “Universals do not exist but rather subsist or have being” [Russell, paraphrased]; 9 “To be is to be the value of a bound variable” [Quine].

What is the problem of universals?

A contemporary philosopher—if that philosopher concedes that there is any problem that can properly be called “the problem of universals”—will see the problem of universals as a problem properly so called, as a problem having the kind of internal unity that leads philosophers to speak of a philosophical problem.

Is free will a metaphysical problem?

Second, there are many philosophical problems that are now considered to be metaphysical problems (or at least partly metaphysical problems) that are in no way related to first causes or unchanging things—the problem of free will, for example, or the problem of the mental and the physical.

What are the things that exist in their own right?

Some things (if they exist at all) are present only “in” other things: a smile, a haircut (product, not process), a hole …. Such things may be opposed to things that exist “in their own right”. Metaphysicians call the things that exist in their own right ‘substances’. Aristotle called them ‘ protai ousiai ’ or “primary beings”. They make up the most important of his ontological categories. Several features define protai ousiai: they are subjects of predication that cannot themselves be predicated of things (they are not universals); things exist “in” them, but they do not exist “in” things (they are not accidents like Socrates' wisdom or his ironic smile); they have determinate identities (essences). This last feature could be put this way in contemporary terms: if the prote ousia x exists at a certain time and the prote ousia y exists at some other time, it makes sense to ask whether x and y are the same, are numerically identical (and the question must have a determinate answer); and the question whether a given prote ousia would exist in some set of counterfactual circumstances must likewise have an answer (at least if the circumstances are sufficiently determinate—if, for example, they constitute a possible world. More on this in the next section). It is difficult to suppose that smiles or holes have this sort of determinate identity. To ask whether the smile Socrates smiled today is the smile he smiled yesterday (or is the smile he would have smiled if Crito had asked one of his charmingly naïve questions) can only be a question about descriptive identity.

Is God eternal or omnipresent?

God, for example—both the impersonal God of Aristotle and the personal God of Medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophy—is generally said to be eternal, and the personal God is said to be omnipresent. To say that God is eternal is to say either that he is everlasting or that he is somehow outside time.

The Socratic Tradition

  • Aristotle is, in a sense, the direct intellectual descendant of Socrates, who is often called the father of Western philosophy. Though none of his own writings survive, Socrates exerted a massive influence on several major branches of philosophy. His views were transmitted by his star pupil, Plato, who presented them in a series of fictionalized dialogues between Socrates an…
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The Corpus Aristotelicum

  • Like Plato and unlike Socrates, Aristotle left behind an extensive body of philosophical writings. Plato's surviving works, however, are mostly exoteric: they are meant to introduce and explain philosophical topics to educated members of the public. The dialogue style of presentation, the inclusion of figures from Athenian history and politics, and the copious allusions to Greek mytho…
See more on coursehero.com

Metaphysics After Aristotle

  • It might seem that an ancient work entitled The Metaphysics should, at a minimum, clarify what metaphysics is. However, millennia after Aristotle lived and wrote, the definition of the subject remains elusive, partly because his Metaphysics embraces such a wide range of topics. Nonetheless, some central themes are evident in Aristotle's work, and the development of these …
See more on coursehero.com