Metaphysics
Overview
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things: what exists, what it is for something to exist, and how the things that exist hang together. Its traditional questions include being, identity, time, space, causation, necessity and possibility, the nature of mind, and whether there is anything beyond the physical. The name is an accident of cataloguing: Aristotle's works on these topics were shelved "after the physics".
Notes
- Metaphysics has a bad reputation among empiricists, and some of it is earned. Alder's razor says that what cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating, and a good deal of metaphysics is exactly that. But some metaphysical commitments are unavoidable: everyone who does science assumes that there is an external world and that it is regular. The honest course is to state them as presuppositions rather than pretend not to have them. See My Presuppositions.
- My metaphysical commitments are few and modest: an external reality exists (Solipsism), it is physical (Physicalism, Philosophical naturalism), minds are what some physical systems do (Consciousness, Mind-body dualism), and events have causes (Freewill vs Determinism). Each is held as the simplest model that fits, not as a certainty.
- Much of religious apologetics is metaphysics done backwards: a conclusion is chosen and then principles are found that entail it. The Argument from Contingency, the Argument from Divine Simplicity and the Argument from the Principle of Sufficient Reason are examples; each rests on a metaphysical principle that is far less secure than the physics it is supposed to explain.
- The Theory of Forms is the founding metaphysical system of the Western tradition and, I think, the founding mistake: the assumption that abstractions must exist somewhere in order to be real. See also Argument from Abstract Objects and Reification.