Metaphysics is dead. Long live metaphysics! Assorted musings of a philosopher-scientist
I am a scientist and a philosopher. As such, I have a problem with metaphysics. A serious problem. Apparently, the word “metaphysics” was coined by an anonymous first century editor of Aristotle’s works. The person in question assembled a small number of the philosopher’s writings and called them “ta meta ta phusika,” literally meaning, the stuff that comes after the Physics, the latter being one of Aristotle’s most famous books.
Ever since, metaphysics has been described as the study of what exists, in the most general manner possible. Aristotle did not invent this kind of study, as it was carried out by the Pre-Socratics of the 6th and 5th century BCE. It continued with Plato, Aristotle himself, and a number of other Greco-Roman and Christian philosophers (in the west, then of course we need to mention the Arabic, Judaic, and more far eastern traditions as well).
It ended, as far as I’m concerned, with Descartes. To be more precise: a particular, traditional style of metaphysics ended with the famous French thinker. That style, sometimes referred to as “first philosophy,” and nowadays as analytic metaphysics, hinges fundamentally on the notion that we can discover things about the way the world is by thinking about it, as people do in mathematics or logic. Call it the…
