Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the study of the most general features of reality, including existence, objects and their properties, possibility and necessity, space and time, change, causation, and the relation between matter and mind.
Some approaches see metaphysics as a unified field and give a wide-sweeping definition by understanding it as the study of "fundamental questions about the nature of reality" or as an inquiry into the essences of things.
Another approach doubts that the different areas of metaphysics share a set of underlying features and provides instead a fine-grained characterization by listing all the main topics investigated by metaphysicians.
According to a common view, concrete objects, like rocks, trees, and human beings, exist in space and time, undergo changes, and impact each other as cause and effect.
[55] A different view argues that modal truths are not about an independent aspect of reality but can be reduced to non-modal characteristics, for example, to facts about what properties or linguistic descriptions are compatible with each other or to fictional statements.
[56] Borrowing a term from German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's theodicy, many metaphysicians use the concept of possible worlds to analyze the meaning and ontological ramifications of modal statements.
From the perspective of the B-series theory, time is static, and events are ordered by the temporal relations earlier-than and later-than without any essential difference between past, present, and future.
[85] Metaphysicians are interested in the relation between free will and causal determinism—the view that everything in the universe, including human behavior, is determined by preceding events and laws of nature.
[109] Conceptual analysis, a method particularly prominent in analytic philosophy, aims to decompose metaphysical concepts into component parts to clarify their meaning and identify essential relations.
[112] Some approaches give less importance to a priori reasoning and view metaphysics as a practice continuous with the empirical sciences that generalizes their insights while making their underlying assumptions explicit.
[119] One criticism argues that metaphysical inquiry is impossible because humans lack the cognitive capacities needed to access the ultimate nature of reality.
Arguing that the mind actively structures experience, Kant criticizes traditional metaphysics for its attempt to gain insight into the mind-independent nature of reality.
According to this view, the disagreement in the metaphysics of composition about whether there are tables or only particles arranged table-wise is a trivial debate about linguistic preferences without any substantive consequences for the nature of reality.
[126] A different criticism, formulated by pragmatists, sees the fault of metaphysics not in its cognitive ambitions or the meaninglessness of its statements, but in its practical irrelevance and lack of usefulness.
[128] Derrida employed this approach to criticize metaphysical texts for relying on opposing terms, like presence and absence, which he thought were inherently unstable and contradictory.
Key differences are that metaphysics relies on rational inquiry while physical cosmology gives more weight to empirical observations and theology incorporates divine revelation and other faith-based doctrines.
They develop conceptual frameworks, called ontologies, for limited domains,[140] such as a database with categories like person, company, address, and name to represent information about clients and employees.
[147] In ancient India, starting in the 7th century BCE, the Upanishads were written as religious and philosophical texts that examine how ultimate reality constitutes the ground of all being.
[150] At about the same time[p] in ancient China, the school of Daoism was formed and explored the natural order of the universe, known as Dao, and how it is characterized by the interplay of yin and yang as two correlated forces.
[152] In ancient Greece, metaphysics emerged in the 6th century BCE with the pre-Socratic philosophers, who gave rational explanations of the cosmos as a whole by examining the first principles from which everything arises.
[166] Medieval India saw the emergence of the monist school of Advaita Vedanta in the 8th century CE, which holds that everything is one and that the idea of many entities existing independently is an illusion.
[167] In China, Neo-Confucianism arose in the 9th century CE and explored the concept of li as the rational principle that is the ground of being and reflects the order of the universe.
[168] In the early modern period and following renewed interest in Platonism during the Renaissance, René Descartes (1596–1650) developed a substance dualism according to which body and mind exist as independent entities that causally interact.
[169] This idea was rejected by Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), who formulated a monist philosophy suggesting that there is only one substance with both physical and mental attributes that develop side-by-side without interacting.
[170] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) introduced the concept of possible worlds and articulated a metaphysical system known as monadology, which views the universe as a collection of simple substances synchronized without causal interaction.
Inspired by the empiricism of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and John Locke (1632–1704), Hume criticized metaphysical theories that seek ultimate principles inaccessible to sensory experience.
[174] This critical outlook was embraced by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who tried to reconceptualize metaphysics as an inquiry into the basic principles and categories of thought and understanding rather than seeing it as an attempt to comprehend mind-independent reality.
[178] Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a strong critic of German idealism and articulated a different metaphysical vision, positing a blind and irrational will as the underlying principle of reality.
[180] At the turn of the 20th century in analytic philosophy, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and G. E. Moore (1873–1958) led a "revolt against idealism", arguing for the existence of a mind-independent world aligned with common sense and empirical science.
[190] Gilles Deleuze's (1925–1995) approach to metaphysics challenged traditionally influential concepts like substance, essence, and identity by reconceptualizing the field through alternative notions such as multiplicity, event, and difference.
