noun
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The field of study of metaphysics.
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The metaphysical system of a particular philosopher or of a particular school of thought.
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A fundamental principle or key concept.
noun
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The branch of philosophy which studies fundamental principles intended to describe or explain all that is, and which are not themselves explained by anything more fundamental; the study of first principles; the study of being insofar as it is being (ens in quantum ens).
example
Philosophers sometimes say that metaphysics is the study of the ultimate nature of the universe.
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The view or theory of a particular philosopher or school of thinkers concerning the first principles which describe or explain all that is.
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In Aristotelian metaphysics physical objects have both form and matter.
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(by extension from the philosophical sense) The metalogic of physics; The logical framework of physics.
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Even other universes should be a result of different physics. Without rules, these universes wouldn't exist, because they will have an undefined, thus impossible, nature. We will never understand or guess all possible forms of physics. That's why we have to understand the generic metaphysics.
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(by extension from the philosophical sense) Any fundamental principles or rules.
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The study of a supersensual realm or of phenomena which transcend the physical world.
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I have a collection of books on metaphysics, covering astral projection, reincarnation, and communication with spirits.
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Displeasingly abstruse, complex material on any subject.
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This political polemic strikes me as a protracted piece of overwrought, fog-shrouded metaphysics!
Examples of metaphysics in a Sentence
Metaphysics he held to be based on psychology.
In them is foreshadowed all that he afterwards worked out in metaphysics, psychology, ethics and aesthetics.
Science, he says, may be compared to a tree; metaphysics is the root, physics is the trunk, and the three chief branches are mechanics, medicine and Ouvres, viii.
It is to her that the Principles of Philosophy were dedicated; and in her alone, according to Descartes, were united those generally separated talents for metaphysics and for mathematics which are so characteristically co-operative in the Cartesian system.
In 1705 Cartesianism was still subject to prohibitions from the authorities; but in a project of new statutes, drawn up for the faculty of arts at Paris in 1720, the Method and Meditations of Descartes were placed beside the Organon and the Metaphysics of Aristotle as text-books for philosophical study.
He entered the order of the Dominicans at the age of sixteen, and ten years later became doctor of theology at Padua, where he was subsequently professor of metaphysics.
For granting that it places the centre of reality outside the individual self it does so only at the price of reducing the reality of the latter to an appearance; 1 Institutes of Metaphysics (1854); Works (1866).
In Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), he uses " dogma " of affirmations, whether supported by reasoning or merely asserted, if they claim " metaphysical " value, metaphysics being defined as " the systematic study of the ultimate nature of reality."
In 1847-1850 he was professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Amherst; and in 1850-1854 was Washburn professor of Church history, and in 1854-1874 Roosevelt professor of systematic theology, at Union Theological Seminary.
Metaphysics, again, is concerned with the ultimate problems of matter and spirit; it endeavours to go behind the phenomena of sense and focus its attention on the fundamental truths which are the only logical bases of natural science.
After that date two more became known; the whole was familiar to John of Salisbury in 1159; while the Physics and Metaphysics came into notice about 1200.
Five years later he became professor ordinarius of logic and metaphysics; in 1759 he exchanged this for a professorship of rhetoric and poetry.
The term has also been applied to the Italian humanists of the Renaissance, and in modern times, somewhat vaguely, to thinkers who have based their speculations on the Platonic metaphysics or on Plotinus, and incorporated with it a tendency towards a mystical explanation of ultimate phenomena.
Thirdly, it can justly claim the honour of Plato's name, since it expressly goes back to him for its metaphysics, directly combating those of the Stoa.
Throughout his philosophy he endeavours to connect metaphysics with ethics and the theory of education.
He had a distinguished university career at Edinburgh, and Balliol College, Oxford, and after being fellow of Jesus and tutor of Balliol was elected professor of logic and metaphysics at St Andrews.
In the unwritten lectures of his old age, he developed this formal into a mathematical metaphysics.
Aristotle knew Plato, was present at his lectures on the Good, wrote a report of them (7rEpi Ta yaBoii), and described this latter philosophy of Plato in his Metaphysics.
The philosophy of Plato is dialogue trying to become science; that of Aristotle science retaining traces of dialectic. Secondly as regards subjectmatter, even in his early writings Aristotle tends to widen the scope of philosophic inquiry, so as not only to embrace metaphysics and politics, but also to encourage rhetoric and poetics, which Plato tended to discourage or limit.
Aristotle then even in the second period of his life, while Plato, was still alive, began to differ from him in metaphysics.
He rejected the Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first adopted his master's dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems, he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works,, which had the result of separating metaphysics from dialectic. The all-important consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle became and remained primarily a metaphysician.
On the whole then, in his early dialectical and didactic writings, of which mere fragments remain, Aristotle had already diverged from Plato, and first of all in metaphysics.
During his master's life, in the second period of his own life, he protested against the Platonic hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the one as the good, and tended to separate metaphysics from dialectic by beginning to pass from dialogues to didactic works.
After his master's death, in the third period of his own life, and during his connexion with Alexander, but before the final construction of his philosophy into a system, he was tending to write more and more in the didactic style; to separate from dialectic, not only metaphysics, but also politics, rhetoric and poetry; to admit by the side of philosophy the arts of persuasive language; to think it part of their legitimate work to rouse the passions; and in all these ways to depart from the ascetic rigidity of the philosophy of Plato, so as to prepare for the tolerant spirit of his own, and especially for his ethical doctrine that virtue consists not in suppressing but in moderating almost all human passions.
An Aristotelian work often goes on continuously at first, and then becomes disappointing by suddenly introducing discussions which break the connexion or are even inconsistent with the beginning; as in the Posterior Analytics, which, after developing a theory of demonstration from necessary principles, suddenly makes the admission, which is also the main theory of science in the Metaphysics, that demonstration is about either the necessary or the contingent, from principles either necessary or contingent, only not accidental.
Finally he died without completing some of his works, such as the Politics, and notably that work of his whole philosophic career and foundation of his whole philosophy - the Metaphysics - which, projected in his early criticism of Plato's philosophy of universal forms, gradually developed into his positive philosophy of individual substances, but remained unfinished after all.
The Metaphysics is clearly a compilation formed from essays or discourses; and it illustrates another characteristic of Aristotle's gradual method of composition.
On either alternative, however, " the first discourses " mentioned may have originally been a separate discourse; for Book F begins quite fresh with the definition of the science of being, long afterwards called " Metaphysics," and Book Z begins Aristotle's fundamental doctrine of substance.
Thus he would enter in the Metaphysics a reference to the Physics, and in the Physics a reference to the Metaphysics, precisely because both were manuscripts in his library.
How otherwise, we wonder, could one man writing alone and with so few predecessors compose the first systematic treatises on the psychology of the mental powers and on the logic of reasoning, the first natural history of animals, and the first civil history of one hundred and fifty-eight constitutions, in addition to authoritative treatises on metaphysics, biology, ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry; in all penetrating to the very essence of the subject, and, what is most wonderful, describing more facts than any other man has ever done on so many subjects ?
He left others imperfectly arranged, and some of the most important, the Metaphysics, the Politics and the logical writings.
Of the imperfect arrangement of the Metaphysics we have already spoken; and we shall speak of that of his logical writings when we come to the order of his whole system.
The incomplete state in which Aristotle left the Metaphysics, the Politics and his logical works, brings us to the hard question how much he did, and how much his Peripatetic followers did to his writings after his death.
There is nothing indeed in the Metaphysics to show whether he left it in isolated treatises or in its present disorder; and nothing in the Politics.
Perhaps something similar occurred to the Metaphysics, as Alexander imputed its redaction to Eudemus, and the majority of ancient commentators attributed its second opening (Book a) to Pasicles, nephew of Eudemus.
Although, however, we may concede that such great works as the Metaphysics, the Politics and the logical writings did not receive their present form from Aristotle himself, that concession does not deprive Aristotle of the authorship, but only of the arrangement of those works.
On the contrary, Theophrastus and Eudemus, his immediate followers, both wrote works presupposing Aristotle's Metaphysics and his logical works, and Dicaearchus, their contemporary, used his Politics for his own Tripoliticus.
The doctrine that all things are substances which are separate individuals, stated in the Categories, is expanded in the Metaphysics.
Again, according to both works, an individual substance is a subject, a universal its predicate; and they have in common the Aristotelian metaphysics, which differs greatly from the modern logic of subject and predicate.
It follows that Aristotelianism in the Categories and in the Metaphysics is a realism both of individuals and of universals; of individual substances as real subjects, and of universals as real predicates.
In brief then the common ground of the Categories and the Metaphysics is the fundamental position that all things are substances having belonging to them universals and attributes, which have no separate being as Plato falsely supposed.
This essential agreement suffices to show that the Categories and the Metaphysics are the result of one mind.
We have now to see that, in writing the Categories, on the one hand he carried his differences from his master further than he had done in his early criticisms by insisting that individual substances are not only real, but are the very things which sustain the universal; but on the other hand, he clung to further relics of the Platonic theory, and it is those which differentiate the Categories and the Metaphysics.
On the other hand, in the Metaphysics, the distinction between inherence and predication disappears; and what is more, the relation of an attribute to a substance is regarded as so close that an attribute is merely the substance modified.
The first difference then between the Categories and the Metaphysics is in the nature of an attribute; and the theory of inherence in the Categories is nearer to Plato and more rudimentary than the theory of predication in the Metaphysics.
For though both works rest on the reality of individual substances, the Categories (chap. 5) admits that universal species and genera can be called substances, whereas the Metaphysics (Z 13) denies that a universal can be a substance at all.
On the other hand, in the Metaphysics (Z 13), he distinctly denies that any universal can be a substance, on the ground that a substance is a subject, whereas a universal is a predicate and a belonging of a subject, from which it follows as he says that no universal is a substance, and no substance universal.
What conclusion are we to draw from these differences between the Categories and the Metaphysics?
The only logical conclusion is that the Categories, being nearer to Plato on the nature of attributes, and still nearer on the relation of universals to substances, is earlier than the Metaphysics.
As the Platonic philosophy was primarily moral, and its metaphysics a theory of the moral order of the universe, Aristotle from the first must have mastered the Platonic ethics.