User:Anthony.Sebastian/MyWiki/Formats

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

Blockquote

quote

refs

·

Bullet Annotate Reference

Text.

Texbox-01

Metaphysics: In its main entry for ‘metaphysics’, the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.) gives four ways in which the word has been used:

a. The branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things or reality, including questions about being, substance, time and space, causation, change, and identity (which are presupposed in the special sciences but do not belong to any one of them); theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science of being and knowing. a1620 M. Fotherby: The Metaphysickes, considering the pure essence of things. | 1739 D. Hume: So far from being able by our senses merely to determine this question, we must have recourse to the most profound metaphysics to give a satisfactory answer to it.

b. The study of phenomena beyond the scope of scientific inquiry.

c. Questions of metaphysics as they relate to a specified subject or phenomenon; the underlying concepts or first principles on which a particular branch of knowledge is based. Usu. with of. 1790 E. Burke: I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics. | 1958 W. Stark: A metasociology which would be, not a metaphysics, in so far as metaphysics is divorced from the empirical, but a study of man as he appears in all societies.

d. Philos. Used by logical positivists and some other linguistic philosophers for: any proposition or set of propositions of a speculative nature, considered to be meaningless because not empirically verifiable. 1937 A. Smeaton tr. R. Carnap: The sentences of metaphysics are pseudo-sentences which on logical analysis are proved to be either empty phrases or phrases which violate the rules of syntax. | 1956 J. O. Urmson: The view of Wittgenstein that metaphysics was not merely outdated as the old positivism had it, but was a logically impossible enterprise, being excluded by the essential nature of language.

NB: See the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for sources of the examples and for additional examples.

Metaphysics (from Greek: μετά (meta) = "after", φύσις (phúsis) = "nature") is the branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the nature of the world. It is the study of being or reality. It addresses questions such as: What is the nature of reality? Is there a God? What is man's place in the universe?

A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into what categories of things are in the world and what relations these things bear to one another. The metaphysician also attempts to clarify the notions by which people understand the world, including existence, objecthood, property, space, time, causality, and possibility.

More recently, the term "metaphysics" has also been used to refer to subjects which are thought to be beyond the physical world. A "metaphysical bookstore," for instance, is not one that sells books on academic treatments of ontology, but rather one that sells books on spiritualism, spirits, faith healing, crystal power, occultism, or Wicca. Such stores are typically stocked with an array of Eastern or "New Age" philosophy such as Theosophy, Western esoteric writings such as Rosicrucian texts, hybrids of East/West such as Alice Bailey, and often purely Eastern writings such as Patanjali.

The word "metaphysics" is generally held to have come from the title given to one of Aristotle's works by the editor of his works Andronicus of Rhodes: Metaphysics, or in Greek, τα μετα τα φυσικά (i.e. the books after the books on physics).

Aristotle himself referred to the subject as "first philosophy". Among Aristotle's other works was Physics. The editor of Aristotle's works, Andronicus, placed the books on first philosophy right after Physics. So those books were called τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά βιβλια, ta meta ta physika biblia, which means "the books that come after the (books about) physics." The name was first given to the work by Andronicus of Rhodes in c.70 B.C., referring to the customary organization of the Aristotlean corpus, but was misread by Latin scholiasts and became "the science of what is beyond the physical." The word comes to the English language by way of the Medieval Latin metaphysica, the neutral plural of Medieval Greek metaphysika. Dictionary.com declares its English origins to be between 1560 and 1570, while the Online Etymology Dictionary finds its origins to be as early as 1387.

Epigraph Example #1

Now is the time for the quick brown fox to eat.      —Tony