Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

  Post 119.  November 29, 2021

  What is Meta-Physics?

   Metaphysics is the purview of Philosophy  

Many of the polarized arguments on the Philosophy Forum hinge on the meaning of the technical term “metaphysics”1. Contributing to the conflict of opinions is that dictionary definitions tend to provide specialized meanings that are only of interest to philosophical scholars : e.g. Ontology & Epistem-ology. So, their application to some common issues of 21st century philosophy may seem “to have no basis in Reality”. Which is technically correct, because the proper domain of metaphysics is Ideality2. Consequently, many theoretical thinkers, guided by the rules of physical Science, take an exclusive approach to their dominion : “if it ain’t real, it don’t matter”. Which is literally true. Because most of what we know for sure is information drawn from sensory impressions of material objects. But those falsifiable Facts exclude any knowledge derived from synthetic reasoning5 about the things we know only via our five physical senses. So IMHO, the purpose of metaphysics is to supplement our matter-based knowledge with information imagined by our sixth sense of Reason. Which includes our self-constructed mental models of reality, that are always moot4. I also think that such mental representations of reality is what Aristotle meant to describe in his supplement to The Physics. However, this post is intended to define only what I personally mean when I use the term Meta-Physics.

The crux of this attempt to narrowly focus “Metaphysics” is to make a distinction between Objective and Subjective Reality; between Pragmatic knowledge and Rational inference. But many scientists, not including Einstein, are only interested in the former, and are willing to leave the latter to feckless philoso-phers. Ironically, too many non-empirical thinkers like to think they are contributing to the scientific endeavor by purging language of “transcendent” terminology. Any suggestion of ideas that go beyond the boundaries of physical science is therefore dismissed as “pseudoscience”. And it’s true that most paranormal5 concepts assume some “reality” beyond-the-scope of physical & empirical investigation. However, many of those eccentric or visionary thinkers like to present their ideas as merely “ahead” of current mainstream understanding. Yet, the logical foundation of their meta- conjectures was laid many centuries ago, by non-empirical philosophers.

Early Christian theologians eagerly adopted the works of pagan Aristotle to supplement their Holy Writ, where its meaning was ambiguous or obscure. So, they interpreted the spiritual implications of Bible Greek in terms of the philosophical book they labeled “The Metaphysics”, indicating that it was the second volume of The Physics : on the nature of Nature. Consequently, the meaning of the meta-name became inextricably linked with Christian Theology instead of Greek Philosophy. For example the original “Logos” referring to an eternal principle, was applied to a temporal incarnation of the Jewish Yahweh. Yet, today the ancient metaphysical and metaphorical methods of reasoning, largely established by Aristotle, are still appropriate where Scientific models and dogma are ambiguous or obscure. And, no aspect of modern science is more enigmatic than Quantum Physics, which undermined many of the settled doctrines of Classical Physics.

                            Blog Post 119 continued . . .

1. Metaphysics :
•  the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space.
•  abstract theory with no basis in reality.
___Google, Oxford

2. Ideality :
The realm of ideas, concepts, and abstractions that go beyond the material aspects of specific factual Reality, to encompass the personal meanings and universal implications of that sensory information to the observer.  An early attempt to understand that meta-sensory uber-reality was  Plato’s theory of FORMs. Each Form was supposed to be an ideal model for some real thing. You could think of Form as the design or recipe for producing a complex physical object.

3. Synthetic Reasoning :
see #6 in right column →

4. Moot :
•  subject to debate, dispute, or uncertainty.
—-Google, Oxford

Hence, perfectly suited for philosophical dialog

5. Paranormal :
Explanations that imply some super-natural forces or non-physical existence. Some equate “Metaphysical” with Paranormal and Supernatural. That’s why I like to spell it as Meta-Physical to imply only that the subject is Subjective instead of Objective.

 6. Synthetic Reasoning :
An “analytic” sentence, . . . has historically been characterized as one whose truth depends upon the meanings of its constituent terms . . . alone, as opposed to a more usual “synthetic” sentence, . . . whose truth depends also upon the facts about the world that the sentence represents, . . . This is sometimes called the “metaphysical” characterization of the distinction, concerned with the source of the truth of the sentences.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/
•  What I mean by “synthetic reasoning” is a holistic concept that is more-than the sum of its parts. In other words, it conjectures beyond specific facts to a general or universal meaning.
•  In philosophy, universals are what particular things have in common : e.g. Properties, Qualia.

Is Aristotle objective or subjective? “Aristotle, by contrast, identifies the ordinary objects of sense experience as the most objective reality. ... One's existence as a non-physical thinking thing is an objective existence, but it appears that Descartes infers this existence from the subjective reality of his own thinking.”
https://iep.utm.edu/objectiv/

“Voegelin's analysis of Aristotle shows that an objective demonstration of human nature is not possible because human nature is non-objective. This means that in order to understand human nature one must enact it for oneself; knowledge of the truth is in this sense subjective or personal.”
https://voegelinview.com/subjectivity-human-nature-eric-voegelins-reading-aristotle/

The

Philosophy

Forum

“I don't believe your understanding that all mental phenomena are considered metaphysical is consistent with any generally accepted definition of the word”.

 — T Clark

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12096/what-is-metaphysics-yet-again/p1

Science of Ideas

ENFORMATIONISM

Metaphysics then is the study of the models we create of reality, it doesn't seek empirical verification for it makes no empirical claims.

___The Mad Fool
The Philosophy Forum