Topics Philosophy

Question What exactly is metaphysics? I’ve heard it argued that metaphysics is simply asking about the existence of things that are or the nature of that existence. I cannot say, “it is,” without talking about metaphysics. Would that mean that everybody is a metaphysician?

Accepted:
October 18, 2009

Comments

Gosh, wouldn't it be great if everyone were a metaphysician? Unfortunately, using ideas that metaphysicians explore no more makes one a metaphysician than using using religious concepts makes one a theologian. There's no simple definition of "metaphysics," but as a serviceable start one might say that metaphysics is that branch of philosophy that investigates the most fundamental and the most general features of reality or what we think about reality. So, for example, while a historian might ask, "What were the causes of the Crimean War?" A metaphysician might ask, "What is history, what is time and history, what are historical causes, and what are human agents such that they can engage in war?" While a biochemist might ask, "What are the compounds that cause a specific reaction in the intestines?" A metaphysician might ask, "What is 'Being' generally, and what is causation generally?" While someone might ask whether or not she should return a wallet she's found on the ground, a metaphysician might ask whether "goodness" is something objective in the world or something subjective, just what people feel or think it is. Now, obviously the boundaries of metaphysics are rather vague. Metaphysics and physics overlap in thinking about the nature of physical reality and time. Theology and metaphysics also overlap. And there are metaphysical dimensions to moral theory, aesthetics, and even logic. Also, you should know that the focus of metaphysics has shifted over time. In ancient and medieval philosophy, as well as in much of modern philosophy, metaphysicians have been concerned with the ultimate features of reality. And, so, metaphysicians were often occupied with developing comprehensive theories about the divine and natural worlds and with categorizing the various kinds of beings. In this regard, metaphysics comprised various metaphysical systems or views of reality; and it focused a great deal of energy on questions of what exists or doesn't exist. For example, traditional metaphysicians of this sort argued about whether being can be immaterial, about whether God exists, about whether God is a being in the sense we are, about whether Platonic or Aristotelian Forms exist, about whether they are transcendent or not, about whether there's a soul and whether it's immortal or mortal, about whether the soul is individual or non-individual and whether or not there's a world soul. In more recent philosophy some of this work persists--especially in questions about whether the sciences present a complete description of reality, about the nature of mind and whether it's distinct from body, about whether we have free wills, about whether or not God exists, and about whether or not the independent objective world includes moral and aesthetic features. But because of developments in philosophy at least since Kant and the 18th century (I might say even since Descartes), metaphysicians have become increasingly concerned not with questions about what exists or doesn't exist but, rather, with questions about how reality is conceived. In this sense, metaphysics might be understood as the attempt to clarify and make coherent our most basic concepts about reality. For example, along these lines metaphysicians are involved with clarifying the concepts of causation, object, property, identity, persons, possibility, necessity, time, etc. So, while Einstein may have given us new ways to describe temporal relations, there still remains a lot of work to be done in figuring out what his equations mean about how we should think about time. While genetics may have given us a greater understanding of the chemical process that go on in our bodies, work remains concerning what those discoveries mean for our conceiving ourselves as persons. While quantum mechanics and sub-atomic physics has presented fascinating new data and descriptions of the behavior of things like light, lots of work remains to be done concerning what those discoveries mean for our conceptions of matter, objects, space, causation, etc. There's also the question of what makes empirical science possible. What sort of beings must we be, and what must be true about the world for it to be possible for us to know the world and to engage in scientific investigations of the world? In short, empirical investigations don't answer all our questions. In many cases they raise hosts of new questions. In addition to empirical inquiry, conceptual investigations are also required to interpret the results of empirical inquiries as well as to understand the conditions for the possibility of empirical inquiry itself, and in many cases that work is the work of metaphysics.