Branches of Philosophy

Metaphysics

met-uh-FIZ-iks

Also Known As First Philosophy Aristotle's own term for the study of being as such, prior to and more fundamental than physics.

Metaphysics

The branch of philosophy that asks what there fundamentally is: the nature of being, substance, causation, time, identity, and the relationship between mind and matter. Aristotle called the subject prote philosophia, first philosophy, because he took the study of being as being to underlie every other inquiry. Central and recurring questions include whether universals such as redness or humanity exist independently of the particular things that have them, whether the world is at bottom one substance or many, what makes an object the same object over time, and whether free will is compatible with a world governed by cause and effect. Metaphysics is deliberately the most abstract branch: its questions cannot be settled by observation alone, which is exactly why philosophers from Parmenides through Kant to contemporary analytic metaphysicians have kept returning to them by argument.

Facts

Disputed

Key Debate

Free will versus determinism: libertarians defend genuine alternative possibilities incompatible with universal causal determination, hard determinists deny that any freedom worth wanting survives if determinism is true, and compatibilists hold that freedom and determinism are not in conflict once freedom is properly defined as acting on one's own desires and reasons. 1

Whether human choices are ever free in a sense incompatible with universal causal determination remains unsettled among philosophers who otherwise agree on the physics.

Key Debate

What most fundamentally exists: a plurality of individual substances bearing properties, as Aristotle held; a single infinite substance under two attributes, as Spinoza argued; or whether the very category of a self-standing thing dissolves on inspection, as Nagarjuna's doctrine of emptiness and the Dao's own namelessness both suggest, from unrelated traditions arriving at a similar dissolution. 2

Beyond disagreement over what exists, some twentieth-century philosophers rejected metaphysical inquiry's legitimacy altogether. The Vienna Circle logical positivists held that metaphysical statements, being neither analytic and a priori nor empirical and synthetic, fail their verification principle and are therefore cognitively meaningless rather than merely false; see the attached dissent.

Central Question

What is there, and what is it like to be it: what kinds of things exist, and what makes something real rather than merely apparent? 1

Key Debate

The problem of universals: medieval scholastic philosophers debated whether general concepts like humanity or triangularity exist as real entities in things themselves (realism), only as mental concepts (conceptualism), or only as words (nominalism), a dispute turning on how the mind achieves universal knowledge from finite particular experience; the realist via antiqua was eventually challenged by the nominalist via moderna associated with William of Ockham. 1

Metaphysics

3 entries

School of Philosophy

Era

Tradition

Nationality

Influenced By

Birthplace / Region

Connections

Associated With

Aristotle

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Baruch Spinoza

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Immanuel Kant

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Includes

The Myth of Sisyphus confronts the human demand for meaning against a silent universe.

Source Albert Camus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Al-Farabi

Aristotle

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Arthur Schopenhauer

Source Arthur Schopenhauer (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Augustine of Hippo

Badarayana

Baruch Spinoza

Being and Nothingness

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Being and Time

Charvaka

Charvaka is a materialist ontology: it denies non-material substances (souls, an afterlife, a creator), a metaphysical position first and an empiricist epistemology second.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Compatibilism

Continental Philosophy

Daoism

Emanuel Swedenborg

Correspondence theology is a metaphysical claim about the relation between the natural and spiritual worlds.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

Epicureanism

Epicurus

Essays: First Series

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Essays: Second Series

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Existence Precedes Essence

Source Jean-Paul Sartre (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Friedrich Nietzsche

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

German Idealism

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Identity of Indiscernibles

Wikipedia files this principle under metaphysics (identity and individuation); the same lead-section sentence is reused as the branch citation since the article does not carry a separate one-sentence field label.

Source Identity of Indiscernibles (Wikipedia)

Illuminationism

Illuminationism (hikmat al-ishraq) is a metaphysics of graded, self-luminous levels of being and light, Suhrawardi's alternative to Peripatetic ontology.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Islamic Peripateticism

Islamic Peripateticism (falsafa mashsha'iyya) continues Aristotelian metaphysics (being, substance, causation) within an Islamic intellectual context.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Jain Philosophy

Jain Philosophy's core positions (anekantavada/many-sidedness, substance-mode ontology, the nature of the soul/jiva) are fundamentally metaphysical.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Jean Baudrillard

Jean-Paul Sartre

Being and Nothingness is a phenomenological ontology of consciousness and freedom.

Source Jean-Paul Sartre (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Kyoto School

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Laozi

Madhva

Madhyamaka

Madhyamaka's central doctrine, sunyata (emptiness) as the dependent-origination nature of all phenomena, is an ontological/metaphysical thesis.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Martin Heidegger

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Meditations on First Philosophy

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Nagarjuna

Nature

Neo-Confucianism

Neo-Confucianism's central philosophical contribution is its li/qi (principle/vital-force) metaphysical synthesis of Confucian ethics with Buddhist and Daoist metaphysics.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Neoplatonism

Nishida Kitaro

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Peripatetic School

The Peripatetic School continues Aristotle's own metaphysics (substance, causation, potentiality/actuality) as its central concern.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Phenomenology

Phenomenology of Spirit

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Plato

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Platonism

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Plotinus

Porphyry

Problem of Universals

Source Problem of Universals (Wikipedia)

Process Philosophy

Process Philosophy is a metaphysical system holding that becoming/process, not static substance, is the fundamental category of reality.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Pythagoreanism

Pythagoreanism holds number as the fundamental principle/substance of reality, a metaphysical (cosmological) thesis.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Qualia

Ramanuja

Rene Descartes

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Representative Men

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Samkhya

Source Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Reason versus Understanding is a metaphysical and epistemological distinction as much as a literary one.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

Sartor Resartus

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Tao Te Ching

Teletransportation Paradox

The teletransportation paradox is Wikipedia's own personal-identity thought experiment, filed as a metaphysics topic in this atlas alongside its sibling entity Compatibilism (also in-branch Metaphysics).

Source Teletransportation Paradox (Wikipedia)

The Absurd

Source Albert Camus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The American Scholar

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Bhagavad Gita

The Gita's teaching on the nature of the self (atman) and its relation to ultimate reality (brahman) is a metaphysical doctrine as much as an ethical one.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Myth of Sisyphus

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Ship of Theseus

Source Ship of Theseus (Wikipedia)

Thomas Carlyle

Sartor Resartus' clothes philosophy is a metaphysical claim about appearance and underlying spiritual reality.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica

Thomas Nagel

Thomism

Thomism's central philosophical content is Aquinas's metaphysics of being (esse/essentia, act/potency, the real distinction).

Source Aquinas, Saint Thomas (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Transcendentalism

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Vaisheshika

Vaisheshika is an atomist metaphysics: its category scheme (padartha) of substance, quality, action, universal, particular and inherence is its defining contribution.

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Vedanta

Yin-Yang School

The Yin-Yang School (Yinyangjia) is a cosmology of complementary forces and five-phase change, a metaphysical classification.

Source Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Zhuangzi

Open Questions

Are human choices ever free in a sense incompatible with universal causal determination?

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information

entry: Metaphysics
s.v. Metaphysics
s.v. Free Will
entry: The Medieval Problem of Universals, Introduction
How do we know, for example, that the Pythagorean theorem holds universally, for all possible right triangles?
Includes: Plato
Includes: Aristotle
Includes: Platonism
Includes: Rene Descartes
Includes: Meditations on First Philosophy
Includes: Friedrich Nietzsche
Includes: Transcendentalism, s.v. Transcendentalism
Associated With: Aristotle, entry: Aristotle's Metaphysics
Associated With: Immanuel Kant, entry: Kant's Metaphysics
Associated With: Baruch Spinoza, entry: Baruch Spinoza
Includes: German Idealism
Includes: Being and Nothingness
Includes: Essays: First Series
Includes: Essays: Second Series
Includes: Phenomenology of Spirit
Includes: Representative Men
Includes: Sartor Resartus
Includes: The American Scholar
Includes: The Myth of Sisyphus
Includes: Kyoto School
Includes: Nishida Kitaro

View the Source

2. Vienna Circle (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophySection 3.1

Quote, Section 3.1

synthetic statements failed testability in principle they were considered to be cognitively meaningless (lacking evaluatability of their truth) and to give rise only to pseudo-problems

View the Source

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.View the Source

Jean-Paul Sartre (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Includes: Jean-Paul Sartre
Includes: Existence Precedes Essence

View the Source

Albert Camus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Includes: Albert Camus
Includes: The Absurd

View the Source

Arthur Schopenhauer (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyIncludes: Arthur SchopenhauerView the Source

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Includes: Samkhya, entry: Sankhya, Introduction

Quote, Includes: Samkhya, entry: Sankhya, Introduction

Sankhya (often spelled Samkhya) is one of the major orthodox (or Hindu) Indian philosophies.

View the Source

Ship of Theseus (Wikipedia)

WikipediaIncludes: The Ship of Theseus, Introduction

Quote, Includes: The Ship of Theseus, Introduction

If no pieces of the original remained in the current ship, was it still the Ship of Theseus?

View the Source

Problem of Universals (Wikipedia)

WikipediaIncludes: Problem of Universals, Lead section

Quote, Includes: Problem of Universals, Lead section

The problem of universals is an ancient question from metaphysics that has inspired a range of philosophical topics and disputes.

View the Source

Identity of Indiscernibles (Wikipedia)

WikipediaIncludes: Identity of Indiscernibles, Lead section

Quote, Includes: Identity of Indiscernibles, Lead section

A form of the principle is attributed to the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

View the Source

Teletransportation Paradox (Wikipedia)

WikipediaIncludes: Teletransportation Paradox, Lead section

Quote, Includes: Teletransportation Paradox, Lead section

It was formulated by Derek Parfit in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons.

View the Source

Open Questions (1 open question)

Are human choices ever free in a sense incompatible with universal causal determination?

Libertarians, hard determinists and compatibilists disagree not only on the answer but on what freedom would have to mean for the question to be answerable at all, so the dispute has not converged even as physics and neuroscience have advanced.

What would resolve this A settled account of whether the laws of physics are genuinely deterministic at the level that matters for choice, combined with an agreed definition of the freedom moral responsibility requires, would resolve it; neither is settled.

Metaphysics, philosophy of action, physicsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Dissenting Readings (2 dissenting readings)

Key Debate

Metaphysical statements about what most fundamentally exists are not merely false but cognitively meaningless: since they are neither analytic and knowable a priori nor genuinely testable against experience, they fail the verification principle and amount to pseudo-problems rather than genuine claims about the world. On this view the entire debate over substances, attributes and the reality of things is, strictly speaking, not a debate philosophy can settle, because none of the positions expresses a proposition with determinate truth conditions.

A dissenting reading, from an independent laneVienna Circle (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Key Debate

Pereboom argues from hard incompatibilism that neither libertarian free will nor the compatibilist redefinition rescues the kind of desert-grounding freedom moral responsibility has traditionally required: if determinism is true no one is ever truly free in that sense, and even if indeterminism is true, the resulting randomness does not confer it either, so both libertarians and compatibilists are answering the wrong question.

A dissenting reading, from Derk PereboomStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the problem of universals, and why did medieval philosophers divide over it?

Medieval philosophers disagreed about whether general concepts like humanity or triangularity are real things, only mental concepts, or only words, a dispute about how a mind with only particular experiences ever reaches universal knowledge.

Medieval scholastic philosophers debated whether general concepts such as humanity or triangularity exist as real entities in the things themselves, a position called realism, exist only as concepts in the mind, called conceptualism, or exist only as words, called nominalism. The dispute turned on how the mind achieves universal knowledge starting only from finite particular experiences. The realist position associated with the via antiqua was eventually challenged by the nominalist via moderna associated with William of Ockham, and the same three-way division still frames how philosophers think about abstract concepts today.

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The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Metaphysics

Albert Camus

Epicurus

Friedrich Nietzsche

Associated With

Includes

Open Questions

What is the problem of universals, and why did medieval philosophers divide over it?