. The original ‘meta’-word, deriving from the title given to Aristotle’s untitled treatise by his first-century BC editor Andronicus. It means that which comes after ‘physics’, the latter being the study of nature in general. Thus the questions of metaphysics arise out of, but go beyond, factual or scientific questions about the world.
A central part of metaphysics is ontology. This studies BEING, and in particular, nowadays, what there is, e.g. material objects, minds, PERSONS, UNIVERSALS, NUMBERS, FACTS, etc. There is the question of whether these all ‘are’ in the same sense and to the same degree, and how notions like BEING, existence, and subsistence are related together. One can also ask whether particular views on logic commit one to particular views on what exists (e.g. propositions, numbers). A particular theory about what exists, or a list of existents, can be called an ontology. Another question involving logic is whether or not existence is a predicate (or property). Ontology borders on philosophy of religion with questions like: Does anything exist necessarily (cf. ONTOLOGICAL and COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS)? It is necessary that something, no matter what, should exist? Can any answer be given to the question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’? ‘Ontology’ is also a technical name for part of the system of S.Lesniewski (1886–1939).
Metaphysics is distinguished by its questions being general. As well as seeking an inventory of kinds of things that exist it asks what can be said about anything that exists, just in so far as it exists. Can we classify all that exists, or in some sense is, or has being, into different fundamental kinds, in one or more ways (see CATEGORIES)? Is there any hierarchy among kinds of things? Do some depend on others for their existence or being? These questions involve the relations between very general notions like thing, entity, OBJECT, INDIVIDUAL, UNIVERSAL, particular, SUBSTANCE, and also EVENT, process, state. Here three metaphysical outlooks, overlapping though not exhaustive, may be distinguished. One outlook (e.g. Plato, the rationalists), takes one or more substances as the basis of the universe. A second takes act and potency (e.g. Aquinas), and a third (PROCESS PHILOSOPHY) takes events and processes (e.g. Heraclitus, the Stoics, Hegel, Bergson, Whitehead). These outlooks, especially the first and third, are connected with attitudes towards change. Adherents of the first outlook have often held either that change is not fully real, or that the most basic things in the universe do not change except in secondary or unimportant ways. The third outlook puts change at the heart of things. It does not deny all unity and constancy, which would result in unintelligible chaos, but makes these depend essentially upon change.
The distinction of act from potency, or actuality from potentiality, derives from Aristotle, as does that of FORM from matter and ‘privation’ (i.e. the absence of form where it could be present). Both these distinctions, it is claimed, are needed when we examine the nature and kinds of change, and they lead us to examine matter itself and its relations to space and substance. SPACE AND TIME in fact provide a whole range of problems about their reality, nature, absoluteness and uniqueness. Change is also closely related to IDENTITY and CAUSATION, both of which also raise special problems in philosophy of mind, concerning personal IDENTITY and FREEWILL.
These notions of change, identity and causation lead to further questions about the general pattern of change in the universe. Is it, in the long run, random or does it lead in a certain direction? Or is it cyclic or repetitive, a view commoner among the Greeks than today though revived on some views in modern cosmology? Is there even, as was believed by some Pythagoreans and Stoics, followed by Nietzsche, an eternal recurrence of the same cycle, an endless repetition of exactly the same world-history? Here we must distinguish between repetitions of the same participants, including ourselves, and repetitions of the same pattern with different participants, our ‘doubles’. The same problems arise over ‘mirror universes’ (cf. SPACE, LEIBNIZ’S LAW, SUFFICIENT REASON).
Questions about space and time suggest further questions about infinity. Is the universe finite or infinite? Here, as in the last para-graph, philosophy and science may overlap. And which is ‘higher’ or more real, the finite or the infinite? There is a distinction here between Christianity, emphasizing the limitations of finite things, and the Greeks, especially the Pythagoreans and Aristotle, who regarded the infinite as essentially incomplete; Aristotle believed that there could not be an actual infinite, and that the infinite is only potential, so that to say that (e.g.) numbers are infinite may be to say merely that you can can always take further numbers beyond those taken already.
All these enquiries about the overall nature of the universe lead to the question whether a necessary being, or God, must be postulated to explain the universe. What sort of EXPLANATIONS can be given? In particular, are teleological EXPLANATIONS needed or possible?
A further general question about the universe is whether in some relevant sense we should regard it as one (MONISM) or many (pluralism). Since monists must presumably admit that plurality is at least apparent, the real/apparent distinction becomes relevant, and with it questions about how far SCEPTICISM with regard to the reality of things can be consistently taken: How different can the world be from what it seems, and how far can we know things as they are? (Cf. EPISTEMOLOGY.) Another view which relies heavily on the real/apparent contrast, because it differs widely from common sense, is IDEALISM, which regards reality as basically mental or dependent on the mind. But idealism need not be sceptical.
An influential source of scepticism earlier in the twentieth century, however, has been interest in the influence of language. Some have thought, especially logical POSITIVISTS like Carnap, that the distinction between substance and attribute is simply a reflexion of the grammatical distinction between noun and adjective (without asking how that itself arose), so that instead of talking of things and qualities we should talk of thing-words and quality-words. We will then see, it is claimed, that we need not regard (say) beauty as a metaphysical entity merely because we have the thing-word ‘beauty’ (cf. FORMAL MODE). How far does ‘ontology recapitulate philology’? Philosophers like the logical positivists, who emphasized language, often reacted against speculative metaphysics (the construction of all-embracing systems that cannot be tested by observation). Many empiricists, notably Hume, do so too, though the mantle of empiricism has at least partly fallen on antirealism (see REALISM). Descriptive metaphysics claims to avoid the vices of speculative metaphysics, without abandoning metaphysics altogether. It confines itself to analysing various concepts, like SUBSTANCE, which it claims to show are basic and unavoidable.
Metaphysics also borders on ethics and aesthetics. It asks whether values are grounded in the nature of things, or contribute to the cosmic process, and what kind of reality is possessed by works of art and the things that make them up (e.g. the figures in a painting).
Taken as the name of a subject ‘metaphysics’ is no longer a ‘bad word’, but the current mood, though far less restrictive than logical positivism, or linguistic philosophy, remains predominantly hostile to anti-common-sense speculations, including idealist or sceptical systems (though idealism has some following in the UK). At the same time it regards most forms of DUALISM as over-simplifying at best. The return of metaphysics is marked by a greater tolerance of large-scale systems, and also of such things as essentialism and substantive (not merely logical) necessity (see ESSENCE, MODALITIES). See also PROCESS PHILOSOPHY.
Aristotle, Metaphysics. (See esp. books 4 (or Г) and 6 (or E), trans. with notes by C.Kirwan in Clarendon Aristotle series, 1971, 2nd edn, 1993, for Aristotle’s conception of metaphysics. His Physics also contains much now regarded as metaphysics, including discussion of infinity in book 3.)
R.Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, 2nd edn, Chicago UP, 1956, supplement A, reprinted in C.Landesman (ed.), The Problem of Universals, Basic Books, 1971. (Holds that much metaphysics depends on language. See flyleaf to W.V.Quine, Word and Object, Wiley, 1960, for ‘ontology recapitulates philology’, attributed to J.G.Miller; cf. the biological slogan ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’.)
*D.W.Hamlyn, Metaphysics, Cambridge UP, 1984. (General introduction from modern viewpoint, developing the speculative/ descriptive contrast.)
S.Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Blackwell, 1980 (original version, 1972). (Influential in revival of essentialism. For an early example of this see also C.Kirwan, ‘How strong are the objections to essence?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1970–1.)
D.H.Mellor, Matters of Metaphysics, Cambridge UP, 1991. (Essays on various topics, amounting to a metaphysical position.)
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 4, 1979. (Single-topic journal issue entitled Studies in Metaphysics.)
W.V.O.Quine, Word and Object, Wiley, 1960, for ‘ontology recapitulates philology’, attributed to J.G.Miller; cf. the biological slogan ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’.)
A.Quinton, The Nature of Things, RKP, 1973 (Discussions both of and in metaphysics.)
