What is a person? If parts of you were to begin to vanish, at what point would you no
longer be considered a person? If we know a person is fundamentally made up of individual
atoms, is the concept of a person really an illusion? Is there a fundamental structure
to reality? What exactly is time, and how does it fit in? These questions are just a
few that one might find in metaphysics. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies what
reality is, answering questions like ‘what is there?’ and ‘what is it like?’.
However, what metaphysics is precisely is controversial and difficult to define. The
reason being that this branch of philosophy and what it attempts to solve has changed
throughout the centuries.
This video will serve as a brief introduction to metaphysics. We’ll differentiate between
‘old’ metaphysics and ‘new’ metaphysics, examine whether metaphysics is even possible,
how science today relates to metaphysics, and exciting problems metaphysics hopes to
solve.
The term metaphysics comes from Aristotle, although he was unfamiliar with the term itself
and referred to its subject matter as ‘first philosophy.’ Around the first century BC
in the ancient city of Alexandria, a collection of fourteen books by Aristotle, which all
dealt with this ‘first philosophy,’ were translated and published. They were given
the title ‘after the physicals’ or ‘the ones after the physical ones.’ Scholars
believe the title was meant to warn students not to read his books about metaphysics without
mastering “the physical ones” or books about regular physics first.
See, philosophers of that time generally believed the world was how you see it without any extreme
skepticism. They used basic physics to study ordinary causes and ordinary things they saw
around them.
What is now called ‘old metaphysics’ or the metaphysics of Aristotle and his contemporaries
until the seventeenth century could be thought of as its own field of study like astrology
or biology. Old metaphysics could be thought of as a science that dealt primarily with
eternal things.
Specifically, Aristotle’s metaphysics dealt with the subjects “being as such,” “the
first causes of things,” and ‘that which does not change.”
Some questions Aristotle and ‘old’ metaphysicians wrote about include…
“Are abstract objects like math, points, or lines the same type of things as physical
objects like chairs?”
“Are being and unity properties of things, and if so, what kind of things are they?”
“Was there a first cause or something that does not change that other causes come from?”
Two big topics of interest in old metaphysics that still appear today are those of ‘universals’
and ‘substances.’
The concept of ‘universal’ was thought to help explain why there was such similarity
in the world. For example, why do apples and roses both appear red? Red could be said to
be a universal or its own entity showed by different individual things. Other examples
include squareness, beauty, or doghood. Substances can be thought of as ‘essences
of things‘ that can exist all by themselves. Some things, for example, a hole in a piece
of wood, exist in other things, if they even exist at all. But other things, old metaphysics
surmised, could exist ‘in their own right’ like the concept of color.
Philosophy underwent a significant change in the seventeenth century and ushered in
what could be called “new metaphysics.” Problems that used to belong to traditional
physics began to be reassigned to metaphysics.
New metaphysics can be said to have started with Rene Descartes, who some consider to
be the father of modern philosophy.
With his ‘cartesian skepticism,’ Descartes questioned what we could truly know. Although
unlikely, what if a powerful demon were tricking our senses, making it seem that what was reality
was something else. The modern version of this argument is what if we’re just a brain
in a vat, being fed information that makes it seem like we have arms, legs and live in
reality.
Until Descartes, philosophers generally took the world to be what it was. But now, since
we can’t know for sure what is real, Descartes wrote, we need a stable foundation of knowledge
before we can create metaphysic systems. After all, it is through knowledge that metaphysicians
claim to be able to say what reality is.
Descartes, who was what is called a Continental Rationalist, believed one could come to rational,
obvious conclusions about what reality is and thus begin building metaphysical reality
systems off those basic conclusions. His ‘cogito ergo sum’ or ‘I think therefore I am’
conclusion to his skeptical problem gave him a foundation to build on.
Although his rational conclusions are heavily contested, the idea of whether metaphysics
is even real or worth studying began to be questioned. It was a topic of main concern
throughout the next centuries.
So, before proceeding any further, we should probably ask whether metaphysics can be done
at all?
-- Skepticism of the ability to do metaphysics
at all only increased after Descartes with the British empiricists of the seventeenth
and eighteenth century, including John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
For instance, one of the great epistemological skeptics, eighteenth-century empiricist David
Hume, argued that knowledge and truths could only come from two sources. These were ‘relations
of ideas’ or ‘matters of fact and real existence,’ an idea referred to as Hume’s
Fork. Relations of ideas refer to knowledge discoverable by the mere operation of thought
like ‘all bachelors are unmarried’ or those of algebra and arithmetic like 2+2=4.
Matters of fact refer to empirical knowledge about the world, which we derive from perception
and science like “it’s raining outside” or the acceleration of gravity is 9.8 meters
per second.
Like a fork, both prongs can’t touch, meaning ‘matters of fact’ can’t influence ‘relations
of ideas’ and vice versa. For any other type of knowledge, including metaphysical
theories, Hume declared, "Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but
sophistry and illusion."
Immanuel Kant took up Hume’s challenge of metaphysical claims but simply came to what
could be said to be a ‘lighter’ conclusion that metaphysics couldn’t fully be done.
Kant attempted to combine rational or what he called a prior knowledge with empirical
or what he called a posteriori knowledge with his idea of synthetic a priori knowledge.
Synthetic a priori knowledge meaning simply, how our minds organise the data of the senses.
His doctrine of transcendental idealism stated that conscious subjects cognize the objects
of experience not as they are in themselves, but only the way they appear to us under the
conditions of our sensibility.
Kant believed there is a reality beyond sense data which he called the noumena, but unfortunately,
we can never really know it, only in ways it appears to us in our minds.
Skepticism that metaphysics was not possible continued into the twentieth century with
the Logical Positivist movement.
Philosophers, including A.J. Ayer and those in the Vienna Circle school of thought, believe
that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful.
The meaning of a statement was its prediction of observable results of an experiment. Thus,
there is no need to postulate the existence of any objects other than these basic observations.
In other words, there’s no need to do metaphysics since metaphysical claims require more knowledge
than can be learned in an observable experiment.
It hasn’t been until the last few decades that metaphysics has been reborn.
Logical positivism and pure empiricism proved to be self-defeating philosophies. Ayer himself
stated that "the most important" defect of logical positivism "was that nearly all of
it was false."
After all, the statement that “only statements which can be verified by experience are meaningful”
is in itself not verifiable.
The work of epistemological skeptics helped us realize that pure verifiable knowledge
is fully impossible since subjects perceive the world. But we can have partial knowledge
of things which can then be used to help make metaphysical claims and understand reality
better.
----
So, science and empiricism haven't replaced metaphysics, but what exactly is metaphysics
relationship with science as of today? Maybe a more important question is, what exactly
is the job of new metaphysics today, and how should it work?
Some metaphysicians believe the job of metaphysics is to run parallel with science.
Philosopher Arthur Fine believes metaphysics should provide theories of which facts or
propositions hold in reality and are the grounds for other facts and propositions.
Philosopher Ted Sider believes metaphysics should strive to “explain the world” in
terms of an underlying fundamental structure.
Most metaphysicians today would refer to themselves as physicalists. Physicalism is the metaphysical
theory that states that there’s an objective reality that everyone shares. Further, this
reality we all interact in is governed only by just nature and a set of natural laws.
All there is to reality are fundamentally mindless arrangements or interactions of matter-energy
in space-time, which can be learned through systematic experimentation and science.
Metaphysics relates to science as it continues asking "why" questions where science study
leaves off.
For example, a scientific theory is that electrons have a charge which can be tested. That’s
where science ends. Metaphysics then enters and explores this topic in science, asking
things like, can an electron’s identity change over time? If it changes, is it the
same particle? What’s an electron’s relationship to, say, the concept of time?
Imre Lakatos, a Hungarian-born philosopher of mathematics and science, explained that
theories in science must have a metaphysical “hardcore” to them which are used to generate
theories and new hypotheses. Science and metaphysics work hand-in-hand, and as he stated “scientific
changes are connected with vast cataclysmic metaphysical revolutions.”
A popular example of metaphysics in action today is the simulation theory hypothesis,
a theory put forth recently by Nick Bostrom that our reality is just a simulation formed
by a post-human or more advanced civilization. Scientific experiments have been drawn up
to test this hypothesis. Although very unlikely to yield anything, if such experiences did
happen to discover evidence, one could easily see how that would lead to more metaphysical
theories, more serious experiments, and perhaps even new branches of science.
However, as stated before, there is still no full agreement on what ‘new’ metaphysics
precisely is and what it should specifically do. For some philosophers, metaphysics is
just a ‘catch-all’ term covering topics that can’t precisely fit into other branches
of philosophy like ethics, logic, and epistemology.
Perhaps the best way to define modern metaphysics is to go over some of the big questions it
tackles and hopes to solve. I’ll go over several different topics, but there are many
more than this, and many of these topics overlap with each other.
#1. Those of Ontology or a branch of metaphysics that studies being and existence exclusively.
Ontologists try to determine things about being, like how we group similar things into
basic categories. For example, we notice many things are white, like the snow or a car.
What exactly is white? Is it what’s called a ‘universal,’ its own thing that appears
on many individual things? Or do universals not exist, only individual things that have
a resemblance?
It also attempts to answer things like which of these entities exists on the most fundamental
level. For example, what’s a person? Isn’t a person just a large group of cells? But
aren’t cells just atoms? Does that mean a person is simply an illusion and fundamentally
just atoms in a certain arrangement?
Another example is the philosophy of mind problem.
In a world that appears to be just nature and the laws of nature, where does the human
mind fit in? What is consciousness exactly?
Two main schools of thought throughout the centuries have been dualism and monism. Dualism,
which originated with Rene Descartes, postulated that the mind was a separate type of substance
from everything else. Dualists include those who believe in property dualism, like panpsychists,
who believe reality is just one substance, but with physical and mental properties that
help explain why conscious beings have subjective experiences.
Monists believe mind and matter are exactly the same kind of substance. This includes
physicalism, among others, the idea that the mind can be explained and reduced in some
way to the workings of matter and the body. Physicalism is perhaps the most common theory
of the mind, but even within this branch, there is argument and various theories.
Metaphysics also deals with causation, determinism, and free will
Was there a single causal event for all of existence? Do causes happen between two events,
like a boat hitting an iceberg and sinking, or just two entities or things, the boat,
and the iceberg? If things are all caused by previous factors, how can we have free
will to make our own choices?
Causal determinism suggests that events within a given paradigm are bound by causality so
that prior states completely determine any state (of an object or event). Simply put,
the state of the universe right now determines what happens next regardless of our will.
Is it possible for us to have free will despite causal determinism? This is what is called
compatibilism. Or is free will fully an illusion, a stance called incompatibilism?
This chart by Galen Strawsen illustrates all the possible answers to the free will vs.
determinism debate.
Space and time are another issue in new metaphysics.
What exactly are space and time and their properties? An example metaphysical problem
regarding time is the direction of time. Physics appears to show that laws of nature are time-reversal
invariant. Think of a film that illustrates a law of nature happening like gravity and
then played backward; it would still portray a physically possible process. However, our
experience of time at a macroscopic level seems to have time moving in just one direction.
Why does time appear to flow in only one direction? Does it not flow at all, but can we only recall
the past in our mind making it seem as though it’s one-directional?
Another issue is that of abstract objects and concepts. What are seemly spaceless and
timeless things like properties, relations, and concepts like math or probability and
their relation with space and time?
For example, if there is absolutely no space or time, could there be a possibility for
space and time to exist? Or do concepts like possibility need a framework of time even
to be a thing?
Many other metaphysical problems have played out throughout the centuries and continue
to this very day. Hopefully, this short little video helped give you at least a basic understanding
of what metaphysics is and what it attempts to do.
In conclusion, as stated before, metaphysics has, in a way, just started over again. It’s
been revived from the clutches of epistemological skepticism. Once again, it is being embraced
as a tool in philosophy that helps us make sense of the important questions humanity
keeps asking, like who we are and what is real.