Overview of and topical guide to metaphysics
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to metaphysics:
Metaphysics – traditional branch of philosophy concerned witlh explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world that encompasses it,[1] althohugh the term is not easily defined.[2] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms: [3]
- What is ultimately there or what if it was never there?
- What is it like?
Metaphysicians
Metaphysician[14] (also, metaphysicist[15]) – person who studies metaphysics. The metaphysician attempts to clarify the fundamental notions by which people understand the world, e.g., existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. Listed below are some influential metaphysicians, presented in chronological order:
- Parmenides (early 5th century BC) – founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy.
- Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BC) – pre-Socratic Greek philosopher famous for his insistence on ever-present change in the universe, as stated in his famous saying, "No man ever steps in the same river twice".
- Plato (424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) – Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Plato's "metaphysics" is understood as Socrates' division of reality into the warring and irreconcilable domains of the material and the spiritual.
- Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) – Student of Plato. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, including metaphysics. Aristotle defines metaphysics as "the knowledge of immaterial being," or of "being in the highest degree of abstraction."
- Kapila (?) – Vedic sage credited as one of the founders of the Samkhya school of philosophy. He is prominent in the Bhagavata Purana, which features a theistic version of his Samkhya philosophy.
- Plotinus (ca. AD 204/5–270) – major philosopher of the ancient world. In his system of theory there are the three principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul.
- Duns Scotus (1265 – 1308) – important theologian and philosopher of the High Middle Ages.
- Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) – Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism.
- René Descartes (1596 – 1650) – "Father of Modern Philosophy". Descartes' metaphysical thought is found in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and Principles of Philosophy (1644).
- Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) – one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. He defined "God" as a singular self-subsistent substance, and both matter and thought as attributes of such.
- Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716) – Leibniz's best known contribution to metaphysics is his theory of monads, as exposited in Monadologie. According to Leibniz, monads are elementary particles with blurred perception of each other, this theory can be viewed as early version of Many-Minds Quantum Mechanics.
- George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) – Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived.
- David Hume (1711 – 1776) – Scottish philosopher, and one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. He challenged the argument from design in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).
- Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) – German philosopher during the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment. Kant's magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics.
- Georg W. F. Hegel (1770 – 1831) – German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. Hegel's thoughts on the person of Jesus Christ stood out from the theologies of the Enlightenment. In his posthumous book, The Christian Religion: Lectures on Philosophy of Religion Part 3, he espouses that, "God is not an abstraction but a concrete God...God, considered in terms of his eternal Idea, has to generate the Son, has to distinguish himself from himself; he is the process of differentiating, namely, love and Spirit".
- Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) – English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived." He believed in a rationally immanent world, but he rejected the hylozoism implicit in Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. The ordered and dynamically informed Universe could be understood, and must be understood, by an active reason.
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) – German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, claimed that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will.
- Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914) – American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist. Peirce divided metaphysics into (1) ontology or general metaphysics, (2) psychical or religious metaphysics, and (3) physical metaphysics.
- Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) – French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson considered change to be the fundamental nature of reality. He opposed mechanistic views of reality, which claimed that future events could theoretically be calculated given enough data on the present and the past.[16]
- Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947) – English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote Process and Reality, the book that founded process philosophy, a major contribution to Western metaphysics. The book is famous for its defense of theism, although Whitehead's God differs essentially from the revealed God of Abrahamic religions.
- Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) –
- G. E. Moore (1873 – 1958) –
- R. G. Collingwood (1889 – 1943) –
- Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) –
- Rudolf Carnap (1891 – 1970) –
- Gilbert Ryle (1900 – 1976) –
- Dorothy Emmet (1904 – 2000) –
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) –
- Donald Davidson (1917 – 2003) –
- P. F. Strawson (1919 – 2006) –
- Hilary Putnam (1926 – 2016) –
- Saul Kripke (1940 –) –
- Willard V. O. Quine (1908 – 2000) – American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. The problem of non-referring names is an old puzzle in philosophy, which Quine captured eloquently when he wrote, "A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word—'Everything'—and everyone will accept this answer as true."
- Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995) – French philosopher. In his book Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Deleuze posits that reality is a play of forces; in Anti-Oedipus (1972), it is a "body without organs"; and in What Is Philosophy? (1991), it's a "plane of immanence" or "chaosmos".
- David Malet Armstrong (1926 - 2014) – Australian philosopher. In metaphysics, Armstrong defends the view that universals exist (although Platonic uninstantiated universals do not exist). Those universals match up with the fundamental particles that science tells us about.
- David K. Lewis (1941 – 2001) – American philosopher best known for his controversial modal realist stance: that (i) possible worlds exist, (ii) every possible world is a concrete entity, (iii) any possible world is causally and spatiotemporally isolated from any other possible world, and (iv) our world is among the possible worlds.