Talk:Metaphysics

2007

This sentence:

Other philosophical traditions have very different conceptions such as "what came first, the chicken or the egg?" Problems from those in the Western philosophical tradition; for example, Taoism and indeed, much of Eastern philosophy completely reject many of the most basic tenets of Aristotelian metaphysics, principles which have by now become almost completely internalized and beyond question in Western philosophy, though a number of dissidents from Aristotelian metaphysics have emerged in the west, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Science of Logic.

must include an editorial error. Perhaps someone who understands the intent of the first part of the sentence will correct the sentence.

--jm

Text included in an earlier version:

Earlier, someone disagreed with the following paragraph and deleted it but failed to give a [justification for the disagreement, therefore I presume they are unable to justify. Note that if you delete the following without a reasonable explanation I will put it back. Just because YOU think someone isn't a good source for metaphysics does not mean your argument is correct.

Robert A. Heinlein, in his book To Sail Beyond the Sunset has the main character, Maureen, state that the purpose of metaphysics is to ask questions:  Why are we here?   Where are we going after we die? (and so on), and that you are not allowed to answer the questions. Asking the questions is the point for metaphysics but answering them is not because once you answer them you cross the line into religion. He doesn't really say why but the answer as to 'why' is obvious: because any answer is an opinion. It may be a good opinion, or a bad one, but it's only what the person who wrote the opinion believes. Such opinions cannot be validated, e.g. you can't ask the person to show you what it's like after death or provide for a personal audience with to their God or gods.

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Larry deleted the above the first time, this time I'm deleting it and I'll attempt to justify. First of all, I don't give a damn about authority or credentials either. I quoted Churchill in an article on subjectivism and he's not known as a philosopher either. I also happen to like Heinlein a lot; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the best work on politics around. The paragraph above, though, is out of place because it's largely wrong, biased, and unhelpful to any reader seriously interested in metaphysics. Presumably someone reading an encyclopedia article on metaphysics and philosophy wants to know what most philosophers actually do and what their general consensus is, not what one single author thinks they do.

It might be acceptable if properly prefaced: "It is popular among some to make fun of metaphysics or to compare it to religion. For example Heinlein..." Then it is clearly marked as an example of a minority opinion, which it is. --LDC

I have revised the statement to more adequately reference it as a minority opinion and to point out the obvious: that the statement applies to itself as well. Paul Robinson

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The reason I deleted it and will continue deleting it is very simple. Heinlein is not a metaphysician and his opinions about metaphysics, whether true or false, don't matter. They don't matter any more than your opinions, i.e., you nonmetaphysicians, regardless of whether they are true or not. Famous metaphysicians, whose opinions about metaphysics are worth mentioning in an article about metaphysics, would include Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and many other historical figures, as well as Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Martin Heidegger, D. M. Armstrong, David Lewis, and many others among more recent philosophers. In this context, the claim that you give a damn about authority is silly. An encyclopedia, insofar as it is about reliable information, requires that we pay attention to authority. An encyclopedia that treats Heinlein as an authority (by mentioning him as giving an important opinion about metaphysics) loses credibility thereby. Metaphysics has a very, very long and distinguished history, and if you're going to start mentioning names in an encyclopedia article, then for chrissakes mention a metaphysician. Mentioning Heinlein makes the article (and by extension, Wikipedia) look like a silly dilettante's game, which it isn't.

Pick the scientific discipline you know most about. Suppose someone were to add a quotation from someone who knows virtually nothing about that discipline to the article about that discipline. Why should anyone get upset when someone who does know a thing or two about discipline comes along, sees the quote, and summarily deletes it? --LMS

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I am sympathetic to credibility, and I agree that recognized authorities should certainly be mentioned most prominently. But I disagree totally that quotes and examples from non-recognized sources are necessarily out of place. If they help to clarify and issue for the reader, or help demonstrate a popular belief about the issue (even if that is generally recognized by experts as a mistaken belief, which fact should also be mentioned), then they are good to include as long as they are correct, useful, and clearly expressed. The Heinlein paragraph still fails on some of those notes: it is still biased, and it's mostly incorrect, conflating metaphysics with mere opinion, which is itself a mere opinion not shared by most real metaphysicians. This paragraph doesn't belong, and I'm happy to be rid of it, but I just want to make a stronger point about "authority": what matters is the result, and only the result. If an article is clear, explains the point correctly, and mentions all the high points (including naming the recognized authorities), then the fact that it uses other sources is a plus, not a minus. It may lose credibility in the field, (i.e., among the cognocenti themselves), but they aren't the audience; ordinary educated people are the audience, and serving them is more important than stroking the egos of experts. In the "subjectivism" article, for example, I quote Churchill not because I think he is a great philosopher, but because Karl Popper, who is a recognized great philosopher, used that very example in his own work to demonstrate the silliness of extreme forms of subjectivism. He used it because it is a good example, not because it holds any authority. --LDC

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There are, sure, exceptions to the implied rule; there are contexts in which it would be appropriate to quote a nonexpert in a subject about which there are experts. But if a quoted view is presented simply as one of the leading views, or an important enough view to mention as a view about some subject--rubbing shoulders, as it were, with more informed views--then there's nothing wrong with deleting it. That's my contention. I might come back to the Popper/Churchill thing later... --LMS

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Moved the damn Heinlein metaphysics to Robert Heinlein/Robert Heinlein on metaphysics. May it be happy there. May we all be happy with this move. Peace.  :-)

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typo?

There is a section of text in the article that reads:

"... (except, in the case of Kant, to knowledge that the noumena exist)."

was it supposed to read:

"... (except, in the case of Kant, to acknowledge that the noumena exist)."

More importantly, irresponsible use

It is more effective to *describe Kant's (or most philosophers') modus operandi than try to label pretentiously.

• Kant derives the necessity of noumena's existence from a synthetic apriori proposition .

Not only does this formulation convey Kant's grounds of the assertion, it closes one's distance and does away with the problematic aspect of those contingent phrases.

Byron mocked metaphysics in his work

What source was this found in?

Science did not originate from epistemology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics
The term science itself meant "knowledge" of, originating from epistemology.
The above quoted article statement is not correct.
unsigned comment added by 112.134.150.9 (talk) 03:51, 13 December 2012 (UTC) Off-topic material deleted by Peter Brown (talk) 23:53, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Agreed, science did not originate from epistemology. The first scientists were the Babylonian astronomers, who substantially antedated the birth of epistomology in classical Greece. I have revised the text accordingly. Peter Brown (talk) 23:55, 13 December 2012 (UTC) Updated by Peter Brown (talk) 19:16, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Where is Nietzsche?

His name doesn't even appear on the page! You would think he would be one of ones featuring most prominently under 'Rejections of Metaphysics'. 111.69.247.235 (talk) 05:19, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Nietzche certainly should be included, but not as one who rejected metaphysics. Continuing a long philosophical tradition, he advanced a novel identification of the arkhē, the fundamental ground of reality. While Anaximander thought that the arkhē was the apeiron and Leibniz held that it consisted of monads, Nietzsche suggested that the will to power is basic. Aristotle, Democritus, Spinoza, Kant, and many others are also part of this tradition. Nietzsche certainly does merit a subsection in History and schools of metaphysics and perhaps in Being, existence and reality. Peter Brown (talk) 19:05, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Kant an Idealist?

"Idealists like Kant believe that time and space are constructs of the mind..." Whether or not Immanuel Kant is an idealist has been the subject of a long running debate. On the one hand, die Mannigfeltigkeit is ordered only in the mind and so in a sense the subject's universe is an entirely mental construct (indeed it is the creative faculty of imagination that decides what things there are, whilst the analytic, deconstructive faculty of reason merely deduces relations between them). - (Critique of Pure Reason)

There is however plenty of evidence to suggest that Kant was an (abstract sort of) realist. The question of how we can know whether the world we perceive bears any similarity to the fact of the matter about how things are was a staple of early modern philosophy. Descartes, conceding that despite his years and learning he knew no more than "Je pense, donc je suis", gave up and declared the reason trusting our perceptions almost always produces consistent and predictable results is because they are contingent on the true nature of the world because "Deus ex machina". John Locke did little better when he proposed that reality is ordered and our passive senses were designed by God to accurately receive the emanations of true reality. David Hume Dismissed the notion that reality could be ordered, and declared that order could exist only in the mind. He also dismissed the idea that we can ever know whether the world inferred from phenomenal experience is in any way similar to an underlying matter-of-fact reality. - (Meditations on First Philosophy, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding)

This brings us to Kant. Like Hume, he rejected the idea that meaningful order could exist in nature, and agreed that ideas are ordered by reason. But he did share Hume's scepticism. Unlike Locke, he felt that the mind was not a passive recipient of sensory information, which it would then attempt to order, but rather played an active role in shaping the world. BUT, there are two points that should be made here. Firstly, whilst the structure and diversity of the world were constructed in the mind, Kant felt that the subject had direct phenomenal contact with the manifold of reality, as well as having certain "transcendental" constraints on his imagination, meaning that it was possible for him to discover the truth of things as they actually were. (Indeed, Richard Rorty argues that Kant was the first to claim empirical science could discover genuine truths about the world). Secondly, Kant himself admits that we can never apperceive noumena, "die Dinge an sich" (things in themselves, non-extended). This suggests that whilst the mind plays an active role in constructing the world of immediate experience, he not only believes in an underlying fact-of-the-matter reality, but feels that it has a direct effect on the world constructed by the mind. (Kathleen M. Wheeler, in "Kant and Romanticism" Philosophy and Literature vol. 13 no. 1, argues that whilst for Kant the mind played an active role in receiving a schematic of the world, the senses themselves were nevertheless still passive and so received the phenomenal consequences of the unordered manifold in exactly the same way as Locke's subject received the phenomenal consequences of an ordered reality.) Whilst I am not putting this forward as definitive proof that Kant was definitely not an idealist, nevertheless I feel that given it is by no means an obvious or consensus point of view it should not be claimed in the article.

Rant over.

R160K (talk) 04:59, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

I think it's clear that Kant is not an idealist in a "traditional" sense. I mean, an important part of the second edition of the first critique is the "Refutation of Idealism" which is exactly as it describes: A proof that "traditional" idealism (which he calls "material idealism") is wrong, on the basis of transcendental philosophy as he had earlier established in the critique. However, the interpretation of Kant's philosophy as "transcendental idealism" is quite normal (see Strawson, Bird, Allison—Strawson even seems to go further, and very much ties Kant to Berkeley). Kant himself calls his philosophy an "idealism", terming it either "transcendental idealism", or, what he takes to be a better term, "critical idealism" (Prolegomena 293-294). --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 07:10, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Why is the Emperor without clothes?

I'm at odds with both the two first sentences in the article:

"Metaphysics is a traditional branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world that encompasses it,[1] although the term is not easily defined.[2] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms"

First veil... to say that metaphysics is a traditional branch of philosophy... is not wrong, but indicates a bias leaning towards what we identify as analytical philosophy, predominant in the Anglo-american world, in contrast to continental philosophy. The arborescent structuring of philosophy into different branches, fields, in which one as a professional philosopher may specialise is to my reading the most clear signifying mark of analytical philosophy. Nevertheless, no real harm, nothing fundamentally erroneous. Allthough to say that it is a traditional branch of philosophy, may mislead the reader to think that branches of philosophy follows naturally along the history of philosophy back to the days of Socrates, Platon and Aristotle. Philosophy as an academic profession is strictly speaking something very young, emerging contemporaneously with industrial modernity. To use the word "traditionally" in this context is clearly giving a misleading notion. The next part of the opening sentence is highly problematic. The starting point of the concept of metaphysics is Aristotles work on physics. Physics, in the sense Aristotle uses the concept, deals with exactly the same things as is here expressed Metaphysics are concerned with! Physics encompasses, in this Aristotelian concept, all branches of philosophy and science, simply the study of everything natural, or that have been given a physical reality (physical relates etymologically to being born). Metaphysics, the name of the sequential work by Aristotle, after his work on Physics, is not referring to some other reality than the physical reality, but encompassing all reality, perceptible and imperceptible, no matter the quality of the content of the things that are to be studied. The distinction between being and phenomena, ontology and phenomenology is not a marker distinguishing physics from metaphysics. Some scholars hold that the concept of 'meta., in the work 'Metaphysics' simply means that this work is the work following the work of 'Physics'. Anyhow, metaphysics should not be regarded in anyway opposite, or dialectic, or regarding another kind of physics, than physics. Metaphysics primarily deals with the premises of knowing and of knowledge itself, with what means can we know, and communicate our research. In the next sentence the word "traditionally" shows up again. Here it is even more vague. In stead of saying "traditionally", it rather should have said: "In common sense metaphysics are often identified with our attempt, philosophically, to answer two basic questions in the broadest sense:".

But it should be no doubt that this common-sensical understanding of metaphysics has little, or anything with the inquiry into the premises of our knowing, acknowledgment, study and research which is at the core of Aristotles' work called Metaphysics, from which the concept and tradition comes. Compare the articles in other languages, especially Continental Europe, or elsewhere where Analytical Philosophy is not the dominant philosophical tradition. As this article appears now, it's terrible, simply wrong. --Xact (talk) 17:30, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

For metaphysics beyond physics

Metaphysics v Physics

The	concept 
in	concert 
or	convert 
would	connect 
in	content 
or	context.

--KYPark (talk) 08:00, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Why is the entire history section so eurocentric ? What about Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese etc. views on metaphysicss ?

Metaphysics v physics

For metaphysics beyond physics 

The	concept 
in	concert 
or	convert 
would	connect 
in	content 
or	context.

--KYPark (talk) 08:39, 3 October 2014 (UTC)