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

38 entries

Founded By

Era

Region

Tradition

FAQs

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.

Connections

Associated With

Aristotle

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Baruch Spinoza

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Immanuel Kant

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Includes

Zeno of Elea

Source Zeno of Elea (Wikipedia)

Zeno's Paradoxes

Source Zeno's Paradoxes (Wikipedia)

Zhang Zai

Source Zhang Zai, Wikipedia

Zhuangzi

Showing 201 to 205 of 205 in Includes, page 5 of 5.

Open Questions

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

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

In the Other Atlases

Influenced By

Pythagoras

Also in Divinity Atlas: which influenced this subject.

Source Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)Walter Burkerttier 1

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

Advaita Vedanta

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

Associated With

Includes

Open Questions

Influenced By