metaphysics Quick reference
A Dictionary of Media and Communication (3 ed.)
... A branch of philosophy concerned with general questions about the nature of reality . Pejoratively (as in ‘mere metaphysics’), useless speculation. See also ontology . ...
metaphysics Quick reference
A Dictionary of Human Geography
... A branch of philosophy concerned with the fundamentals of existence. A ‘metaphysical statement’ or argument can concern ontology , epistemology , or both. To be more specific, it can relate to the nature of causality, existence, space, time, death, life, continuity, change, and other foundational subjects. Human geographers have made many metaphysical arguments as part of their research, even if they rarely use the word metaphysics. For example, critical realism is predicated on several metaphysical claims about the nature of the human and...
metaphysics Quick reference
World Encyclopedia
... Branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of reality and with the nature of the universe. Metaphysics divides into ontology , the study of the essence of being, and cosmology , the study of the structure of the universe. Leading metaphysical thinkers include Plato , Aristotle , Descartes , Leibniz , Kant , and A. N. Whitehead...
metaphysics Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (3 ed.)
... Philosophical enquiry into ideas about being and knowing which seem to be beyond what is empirically knowable. The Scottish empiricist Hume denied its validity, believing that we can know only what is perceived by the senses. See Metaphysics...
metaphysics Quick reference
A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)
...to works he wrote after his essays on physics. Aristotle himself did not use the word metaphysics—the subject matter he considered, which has since been labelled metaphysics, he referred to as ‘first philosophy’. Jacques Derrida defines deconstruction as a critique of western metaphysics, which seems to mean the whole of western philosophy. In contrast, Gilles Deleuze ’s work might be thought of as a lifelong attempt to discern the physical underpinnings of metaphysics...
metaphysics Quick reference
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3 ed.)
... . The name given by the Greek editors of Aristotle to his ‘First Philosophy’, and by analogy to treatises on cognate subjects; it originally merely indicated the position of the books on the subject in the Aristotelian corpus : after ( meta ) the Physics . The scope of metaphysical enquiry is hard to define. To Aristotelians it is the study of being as such; to idealists that of the ultimate implication of experience; to modern realists, that of the most pervasive features of reality (self-consistency, spatial and temporal relatedness, causality,...
metaphysics Reference library
Richard Cross
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (4 ed.)
...on the validity of metaphysics. Kant ’s Critique of Pure Reason attacked the current metaphysical proofs of God, freedom, and immortality, yet he insisted that God, freedom, and immortality were all necessary postulates of practical reason, thus ‘destroying reason to make room for faith’. Other trends, e.g. Marxism and Freudianism, seek to undermine traditional metaphysics by demonstrating that the real determinants of philosophical belief are unconscious. Overall these doubts have tended to modify and deepen the enterprise of metaphysics rather than to...
metaphysics Quick reference
A Dictionary of Philosophy (3 ed.)
... According to Bradley , metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct, although as Broad remarked, to find these reasons is no less an instinct. Originally a title for those books of Aristotle that came after the Physics , the term is now applied to any enquiry that raises questions about reality that lie beyond or behind those capable of being tackled by the methods of science. Naturally, an immediately contested issue is whether there are any such questions, or whether any text of metaphysics should, in Hume ’s...
metaphysics Reference library
Richard L. Gregory
The Oxford Companion to the Mind (2 ed.)
... . Metaphysics is generally taken to mean philosophical speculation beyond the current or even seemingly possible limits of science or technology to test, the development of systems intended to explain origins and purpose, and the place of man in the universe. The word ‘metaphysics’ has its origin simply from those books of Aristotle which were placed in sequence after his Physics . The pejorative sense of ‘obscure’ and ‘over-speculative’ is recent, especially following attempts by A. J. Ayer and others to show that metaphysics is strictly...
Metaphysics Reference library
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable (19 ed.)
... (Greek, ‘after-physics’) The branch of philosophy that deals with first principles, so called because the name was posthumously given to aristotle ’s ‘First Philosophy’ which he wrote after his Physics (4th century bc ). At various times the whole range of philosophical enquiry has been classed as metaphysics and the contrast between philosophy and science is comparatively modern. Metaphysical poets A term used to describe certain poets of the 17th century, notably John Donne ( 1572–1631 ), George Herbert ( 1593–1633 ), Richard Crashaw ( c....
Metaphysics Reference library
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
... . The study of the most fundamental constituents of reality. The term was given by a later editor to a series of treatises by Aristotle , because the topics covered came after ( meta ) the philosophy of nature ( physics ). In those treatises Aristotle dealt with topics which do not belong to any particular science, both the analysis of fundamental concepts like ‘substance’, ‘cause’, ‘form’, and ‘matter’, and theological questions, especially that of the ‘Unmoved Mover’. The Logical Positivists dismissed metaphysical claims as meaningless, because...
metaphysics Reference library
The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages
... The highest philosophical discipline, also called ‘First Philosophy’ or ‘the divine science’. Medieval metaphysics draws from several sources—the metaphysics of *Aristotle and the Islamic philosophers *Avicenna and *Averroës , whose writings became available in Latin early in the 13th century—but also contains original elements. 1. The subject matter of metaphysics 2. Metaphysics as transcendental science 3. The composition of essence and existence 1. The subject matter of metaphysics Aristotle’s divergent statements on the subject matter...
Metaphysics Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages
...( Hexaemeron , I, 13). Metaphysics discovers the circle of exitus and reditus : “I came out from you the Most High, I come towards you the Most High, and by you the Most High. Such is the metaphysical centre that leads back [to God ] and such is all our metaphysics: emanation, exemplarity, fulfilment” (I, 17). A wholly different critique of a metaphysic of Aristotelian type was formulated by Berthold of Moosburg who, in a remarkable prologue to his Commentary on the Elements of theology , contrasted Aristotelian metaphysics “which does not go beyond...
metaphysics Quick reference
A Dictionary of Sociology (4 ed.)
... The most ambitious of all philosophical projects is to devise a theory of the nature or structure of reality, or of the world as a whole. This project is commonly termed metaphysics, and its intellectual viability has been widely challenged in 20th-century Western philosophy. Metaphysics flourished in classical Greece, and also in the context of scientific revolution in 17th-century Europe. Philosophers such as Descartes , Leibniz, and Spinoza thought that a systematic use of reason could lead them to a view of the nature of the world, which turned...
metaphysics Reference library
The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy
...belittle metaphysical stances from an analytical point of view, and so contribute to the view that metaphysics was passé . Ironically therefore, it was also from the general area of analytic philosophy that the remarkable revival of metaphysics in the late twentieth century began. While Quine was undermining Carnap's rejection of metaphysics by criticizing the analytic/synthetic distinction, Strawson introduced the term ‘descriptive metaphysics’ to inaugurate a new metaphysical extension to ordinary language philosophy . ‘Descriptive metaphysics is...
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The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome
...else. The name “metaphysics” signifies that first philosophy follows physics within this philosophical curriculum. Yet even before there was a distinct inquiry into metaphysics, the earliest, Milesian reflection on natural philosophy presumably involved assumptions about metaphysics. For instance, Thales’ doctrine that all is water might be understood as involving metaphysical assumptions about persistence through change. Explicit reflection about metaphysics occurs first in Parmenides ( fl. 490–450 ), who connected metaphysics with epistemology in a...
METAPHYSICS Reference library
The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (2 ed.)
...who were troubled by the apparent contradictions between rabbinic Judaism and current philosophy. Other Jewish thinkers, however, were skeptical of metaphysics. In his Kuzari , Yehuda ha-Levi attempted to demonstrate the inadequacy of Aristotelian philosophy and argued for the superiority of religious revelation. Similarly Ḥasda’i ben Avraham Crescas, in his Or Adonai , argued strongly against the metaphysics of Maimonides and maintained that the only certainty lay in trusting in the authority of scripture. Hermann Cohen , Religion of Reason: Out of the...
Metaphysics Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (3 ed.)
...23 objections to the theory of Forms). As metaphysics is primary philosophy it is identified with theology, on which everything else is dependent. What Aristotle here calls God operates as a final cause, the changeless source of change in others (commonly known as the Unmoved Mover; see soul ); it is through the existence of God that the motion of the stars comes about, and this causes the change of seasons and consequently change in everything else ( see also Physics ). The topics covered in the Metaphysics are many and complex, and contain much that...
Metaphysics Reference library
Caner Dagli
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Science, and Technology in Islam
... Metaphysics of Healing ( al-Ilahīyāt min al-Shifaʾ ), lays out perhaps the important feature of metaphysics in the philosophical tradition, one which distinguishes it from dialectical theology ( kalām ). He differentiates between the “subject matter” ( mawḍuʿ ) and the “thing sought after” ( maṭlūb ) in a given field of study. In the case of metaphysics, God could not be the subject matter in the way that quantities are the subject matter of mathematics; quantities are taken as a given in mathematics, and one explores their properties. But in metaphysics,...
Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (Treasury of Metaphysics with Self-Commentary) Reference library
Oren Hanner
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Buddhism
...(Treasury of Metaphysics with Self-Commentary) Introduction The Abhidharmakośabhāṣya ( Treasury of Higher Knowledge with Self-Commentary ; often abbreviated as AKBh ) is an influential treatise on early Buddhist doctrine, composed around the end of the 4th century ce by the prominent Indian philosopher Vasubandhu ( 4th to 5th centuries ce ). The work systematically lays down the philosophical views of two key early Buddhist philosophical systems—the Sarvāstivāda (literally “the theory that all [factors] exist”) and the Sautrāntika...
