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Metaphysics

A basic introduction to the area of philosophy called `metaphysics`

Date : 01/06/2022

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Neil

Uploaded by : Neil
Uploaded on : 01/06/2022
Subject : Philosophy

Metaphysics

The bread-and-butter of philosophy for most of its lifetime. Thales, the first philosopher was know to engage in it Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the latest called it simply absolute darkness . So what is metaphysics, what does it attempt to study, and can we even do it?

After Physics

Metaphysics is the study of reality itself. The name metaphysics is taken from the title of one of Aristotle s books, the one that came after his Physics, and so metaphysics literally means after-Physics. Aristotle s Metaphysics includes discussions on causation, substance (the stuffs that all things are made from), the nature of existence and whether certain things must exist for the rest to. Pretty heavy stuff. And this heavy stuff is representative of this thing we call metaphysics. It asks the broadest possible questions and seeks the answers that comprehend the most general aspects of our reality and experience. But to nail it down a bit we shall present a few case studies, so you can start to get a feel for what counts as metaphysics, and what philosophers have tended to think of it.

Search for the Arche

The Greeks were very keen on this concept of an arche (pronounced arky , like in the song about Noah). It basically means, first thing or first principle . What was the first thing out of which all others were made? What was the one thing from which the variety of the world came? Among the Pre-Socratics, a rather heterogenous group of thinkers clumped together simply because they were before Socrates, there were those whose metaphysical speculation were aimed at answering these questions. Thales of Miletus was said to have landed on water as the thing from which all others come. The world rises out of moisture and tends towards it, so water must be the arche, the first thing in creation. Heraclitus thought that it was fire, though he may have meant this in a somewhat metaphorical sense he said that the only constant in the world is change, and that some great metaphysical fire was the agent of that change, causing reality to burn up and re-solidify and burn up again. Another rather more abstract identification of the arche was made by Anaximander, who said that it was apeiron or, the infinite .

At the core of all these speculations however, was this conviction that there was one thing that could explain the existence of all the rest. These men were looking at reality, at the world around them, and trying to find explanations encompassed it all. They wanted to find some entity that knitted the whole together. This is a metaphysical project: the search for an arche.

It Wasn t Me, It Was My Atoms

Are we free to do as we please or is everything we do determined in some way? This is one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy (in fact of human existence) and a lot of thinkers have had a crack at answering it. There can be said to be roughly two opposing ways of answering it: the Libertarians say, yes we have freewill the Determinists that our actions are, as the name suggests, determined by some factor or other. A third

compromise position exists know as Compatibilism, which seeks to maintain the idea of freewill whilst taking seriously the power of determining factors on us.

There are, though certain factors to be considered by any budding philosophers/ metaphysicians. The big puncher for the determinists is the nature of causality. Basically, the determinist will, probably quite rightly, tell us that: every event has a cause all of our actions are events therefore all of our actions are caused, not chosen. And if our actions are anything like other events then the result is determined by the cause. For example, I hit a tennis ball with a racket, the ball always flies off in a roughly determinable direction and not say, up into outer space or back in time. The cause always produces the same outcome. So if my action is an event, and that event is caused, the outcome must always be the same there is no room for my choosing between outcomes, that is determined by the cause.

The Libertarian on the other hand will point to things like moral responsibility. If our actions are determined then there is no use in praising or blaming anyone, for even if someone did something bad like murder someone, they cannot be held accountable for one can only be punished for actions of which one is the agent. If my actions are determined I am not the cause and so I cannot be praised or blamed for them. And since so much our living assumes the reality of moral responsibility, we just must be in some sense free.

A man named Epictetus held a rather qualified version of Libertarianism. He said that we are free, but that that freedom only really applied to how we chose to react to things. We may be praised or accused, rained on or recognized and promoted. We cannot choose what happens to us, but our will (or prohairesis) can choose to how to take these things we can be accused and yet choose not to take offense or we can get rained on and choose not to be depressed by the fact. In this we have complete freedom. This is a good subtle form of Libertarianism.

There are counterarguments to both of these positions and the question is far from settled, but you can see from this the kind of scope metaphysical questions can aim at.

Sensible Suggestions

Come now to 18th Century Ireland (not hard for a metaphysician). Bishop George Berkeley (who gave his name to the US university) said some very remarkable things about reality. Things only exist when they are being experienced is a rough but reliable sound-bite. By this he meant that all we experience are sensations we see a chair, feel its smoothness taste an apple hear a door slam. But we have no evidence that there is anything else about these objects other than these sensations - we can t really be sure that as well as sensations there are also objects that make the sensations happen. In fact it seems probable that objects simply are the sensations we experience, that is their whole existence. And so they don t exist when we don t experience them tables, doors and apples don t exist if no-one is experiencing them. That is what Bishop Berkeley says and it is called Idealism (not as in youthful idealism the world is a great place, but idea(l)ism, the world is made up of ideas, mental things).

Berkeley s idealism is a type of metaphysical theory. It tries to go beyond experience to tell us something about the nature of the world in-itself, what is the overarching nature of the world we experience. In Berkeley s case that nature is pretty insubstantial, its just made up of minds and experience! However, Berkeley stands as a good example of someone trying

to go beyond the laboratory results so to speak, to ask not just what do the results tell us but what must existence be like that we can get the results. This is what metaphysics is about, trying to get behind the results.

Just one more short study should make things clear.

The Thing-in-Itself

No account of metaphysics would be complete without mentioning Kant. Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher, almost contemporary with Berkeley, who took metaphysics to new heights. He wanted to investigate the Ding-an-sich, the thing-in-itself. By this he meant the actual nature of an object, quite apart from its phenomenal appearance (our experience of it). Did such a thing-in-itself exist, and could we get behind our perception of an object to know something of how it truly exists? Well, yes and no. Unlike Berkeley, Kant thought that there was more to objects than just our experience of them. But as to our knowing them, this we could not do directly. The raw material of reality is so filtered through our experience that we cannot rescue the original. However, we can use reason to examine our experience in such a way that, we can be pretty sure that what we think about an object is close to how it actually is.

So Kant is doing metaphysics in that he is not resting content simply with the way the world appears, but he is using his reason to work out if that is the way the world actually is. He is doing something, if you will, beyond physics.

Sophistry and Illusion ?

These case studies illustrate some of the things covered by the blanket term metaphysics . But some are rather skeptical as to whether there is anything for the metaphysician to talk about, or if there is, whether silence is not the best response.

Scottish philosopher David Hume was very sensitive about metaphysics, and this was probably motivated by his deep empiricism (all that we know we know from experience). He even came pretty close to denying causality, that old metaphysical topic, on the grounds that we never actually experience it. To be sure we see one billiard ball hitting another and the second moving off from the impact, and it might seem to us like the first ball is causing the second to move. However, we never experience the cause itself, we only experience the constant conjunction of one event with another. So you can imagine what he thought about more abstract metaphysics:

If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Now Hume is probably blustering a bit here, but it does go to show what some philosophers think of even the possibility of metaphysical knowledge.

The Analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer thought that metaphysics was simply nonsense as its claims couldn t be verified by any conceivable experiment or experience. Obviously there

is no empirical evidence one could offer to support Kant s thesis of the obscurity of the thing-in-itself. But some would argue that this doesn t discredit metaphysics altogether.

Though no friend of metaphysics in his later career, the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein may provide a possible reprieve for the subject. He argued, in a collection of his notes put together under the title On Certainty, that there are things that we must accept as certain and immovable if we are to be able to get about in the world and know things. These certainties he said were like hinges, fixed points on which our daily activities and our knowledge turned. Beliefs like there is an external word and other people have minds are examples of such hinges. But these statements sound suspiciously metaphysical. They claim things about the nature of the world in itself (that it exists apart us), and about mental realities (that they exist in others). So if there is anything to what Wittgenstein says about certainty, then maybe there is a way out of Hume- and Ayer-like criticisms. I offer this as a possibility though, I leave it to you to decide!

Roundup

Metaphysics, the study of reality, has been with us a long time and has been an integral part of philosophy its whole life long, whether as its substance or as a target to be shot at. But despite the rise in materialism and the growing conviction that what we see is all there is , metaphysical speculation continues. It may even be part of what we do every day.

Further Reading

A good book with a broad range of metaphysical topics discussed is:
- Peter van Inwagen Dean W. Zimmerman (editors), Metaphysics: The Big Questions

(2nd Edition), Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
Also there is a Routledge guide on the subject:
- Michael Loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, Routledge, 2006.

You should be a little careful though with books called Introduction to Metaphysics or something like it, as they may simply represent the very particular view of the philosopher author (though I m sure that these examples are in many cases entertaining in themselves they may not provide the objective broad base you re looking for. Martin Heidegger s Introduction... is a good example of this: fascinating book, very Heideggerian).

If you like what you ve heard of some of the thinkers here you might want to try:

- Catherine Osborne, A Very Short Introduction to Presocratic Philosophy, OUP, 2004.
- Robin Waterfield (editor), The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists, Oxford Paperbacks, 2009. This contains the surviving writings of the Pre-Socratics with introductory notes.

  • - Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Penguin, 2004.

  • - Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings, Penguin, 2008.

  • - Roger Scruton, A Very Short Introduction to Kant, Oxford Paperbacks, 2001.

  • - Immanuel Kant, A Critique of Pure Reason, Penguin, 2007. Kant is tough, but go for it if you re brave!

  • - George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues, Oxford Paperbacks, 2009.

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