Can someone explain these terms for me please?

Question

Hey everyone,
I am doing a paper about ontologists and philosophers and these terms keep popping up. Can someone please explain them to me?

What exactly is a realist phenomenologist? I want a general concept so I can grasp the idea.

Also, what is transcendental idealism?

And whats metaphysics?

Answer 1

Metaphysics: It is the study of being or reality.[2] It addresses questions such as: What is the nature of reality? What is humankind's place in the universe? Are colors objective or subjective? Does the world exist outside the mind? What is the nature of objects, events, places?

Transcendental Idealism: Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant presents it as the point of view which holds that our experience of things is about how they appear to us, not about those things as they are in and of themselves.

Not really sure what you mean by realist phenomenologist.

Answer 2

transcendental idealism is "anyone's opinion" in the matter of any matter. Metaphysics is the study and science of Being. want to know more? read the following:

You can read thousands of authors and all of them WITHOUT EXCEPTION round up their answers to "what if"? and get lost on the meaning. The up most authority on the Psyche an its human expression is writer and psychic poet Jane Roberts and her line of "Seth Books" that she has channeled from 1963 through 1984 and she has clocked over 24,000 hours of seance time speaking for SETH as she describes him as a "an energy entity or personality no longer focused on physical reality" After 29 years of reading about metaphysics and the such, no one and I mean no one can do it better than Seth and Jane Roberts (not the same person) some of her books are titled "Seth Speaks", "The nature of personal reality", "The Psyche and its human expression" and "The unknown reality vol. 1 and 2" among others. After reading her books, no other authors make sense anymore or even come close. Her writings and verbatim notes and essays are considered the most important and most impacting ideas of the last century and are archived in the Yale Library of the State of New York but her books are available still. Glad to help.

Answer 3

An educated guess...transcendental idealism

is transcendentalism! Read about Henry david Therue (sp?) He lived in a cabin for 2 years or something, he had an idea that we should simplify our lives

Hope i'm not wrong!

Answer 4

Nighwatchman is a batsmen sent in a test match towards the end of the day to just bat through. Googly is a type of spin when a leg spinner bowls a delivery to spin to the off side. Silly mid on is a field position very close to the batsmen on the on(leg) side wheras silly mid off is the same but on the opposite side. Yorker is a delivery bowled at full length. (pitches close to the feet)

Answer 5

1

Answer 6

Metaphysics is the study of being as being. The question is metaphysics is not "What does it mean to be human?", but rather "What does it mean to be?"

I'm sorry that I can't help you with the other terms.

Answer 7

I will try
Transcendental idealism
also called formalistic idealismterm applied to the epistemology of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who held that the human self, or transcendental ego, constructs knowledge out of sense impressions and from universal concepts called categories that it imposes upon them. Kant's transcendentalism is set in contrast to thoseof two of his predecessors—the problematic idealism of René Descartes, who claimed that the existence of matter can be doubted, and the dogmatic idealism of George Berkeley, who flatly denied the existence of matter. Kant believed that ideas, the raw matter of knowledge, must somehow be due to realities existing independently of human minds; but he held that such things-in-themselves must remain forever unknown. Human knowledge cannot reach to them because knowledge can only arise in the course of synthesizing the ideas of sense.

Transcendental idealism has remained a significant strand in later philosophy, being perpetuated in various forms of Kantian and Neo-Kantian movements of thought.


Characteristics of Phenomenology

In view of the spectrum of Phenomenologies that have issued directly or indirectly from the original work of the Austrian-born German philosopher Edmund Husserl, it is not easy to find a common denominator for such a movement beyond its common source. But similar situations occur in other philosophical as well as non-philosophical movements.


Essential features and variations

Although, as seen from Husserl's last perspective, all departures from his own views could only appear as heresies, a more generous assessment will show that all those who consider themselves Phenomenologists subscribe, for instance, to his watchword, Zu den Sachen selbst (“To the things themselves”), by which they meant the taking of a fresh approach to concretely experienced phenomena, an approach, as free as possible from conceptual presuppositions, and the attempt to describe them as faithfully as possible. Moreover, most adherents to Phenomenology hold that it is possible to obtain insights into the essential structures and the essential relationshipsof these phenomena on the basis of a careful study of concrete examples supplied by experience or imagination and by a systematic variation of these examples in imagination. Some Phenomenologists also stress the need for studying the ways in which the phenomena appear in men's object-directed (“intentional”) consciousness.

Beyond this merely static aspect of appearance, some also want to investigate its genetic aspect, exploring, for instance, how the phenomenon intended—for example, a book—shapes (“constitutes”) itself in the typical unfolding of experience. Husserl himself believed that such studies require a previous suspension of belief in the reality of these phenomena, whereas others consider it not indispensable but helpful. Finally, in existential Phenomenology, the meanings of certain phenomena (such as anxiety) are explored by a special interpretive (“hermeneutic”) Phenomenology, the methodology of which needs further clarification.
Characteristics of Phenomenology

Contrasts with related movements

It may also be helpful to bring out the distinctive essence of Phenomenology by confronting it with some of its philosophical neighbours. In contrast to Positivism and to traditional Empiricism, from which Husserl's teacher at Vienna, Franz Brentano, had started out and with which Phenomenology shares an unconditional respect for the positive data of experience (“We are the true positivists,” Husserl claimed in his Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie [1913; “Ideasfor a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy”]), Phenomenology does not restrict these data to the range of sense experience but admits on equal terms such non-sensory (“categorial”) data as relations and values, as long as they present themselves intuitively. Consequently, Phenomenology does not reject universals; and, in addition to analytic a priori statements, whose predicates are logically contained in the subjects and the truth of which is independent of experience (e.g., “All material bodies have extension”), and the synthetic a posteriori statements, whose subjects do not logically imply the predicate and the truth of which is dependent on experience (e.g., “My shirt is red”), it recognizes knowledge of the synthetic a priori, a proposition whose subject does not logically imply the predicate but one in which the truth is independent of experience (e.g., “Every colour is extended”), based on insight into essential relationships within the empirically given.

In contrast to phenomenalism, a position in the theory of knowledge (epistemology) with which it is often confused, Phenomenology—which is not primarily an epistemological theory—accepts neither the rigid division between appearance and reality nor the narrower view that phenomena are all that there is (sensations or permanent possibilities of sensations). These are questions on which Phenomenology as such keeps an open mind—pointing out, however, that phenomenalism overlooks the complexities of the intentional structure of men's consciousness of the phenomena.

In contrast to a Rationalism that stresses conceptual reasoning at the expense of experience, Phenomenology insists on the intuitive foundation and verification of concepts and especially of all a priori claims; in this sense it is a philosophy from “below,” not from “above.”

In contrast to an Analytic philosophy that substitutes simplified constructions for the immediately given in all of its complexity and applies “Ockham's razor,” Phenomenology resists all transforming reinterpretations of the given, analyzing it for what it is in itself and on its own terms.

Phenomenology shares with Linguistic Analysis a respect for the distinctions between the phenomena reflected in the shades of meaning of ordinary language as a possible starting point for phenomenological analyses. Phenomenologists, however, do not think that the study of ordinary language is a sufficient basis for studying the phenomena, because ordinary language cannot and need not completely reveal the complexity of phenomena.

In contrast to an Existential philosophy that believes that human existence is unfit for phenomenological analysis and description, because it tries to objectify the unobjectifiable, Phenomenology holds that it can and must deal with these phenomena, however cautiously, as well as other intricate phenomena outside the human existence.

Herbert Spiegelberg


Origin and development of Husserl's Phenomenology

Basic principles

Phenomenology was not founded; it grew. Its fountainhead was Edmund Husserl, who held professorships at Göttingen and Freiburg im Breisgau and who wrote Die Idee der Phänomenologie (The Idea of Phenomenology, 1964) in 1906. Yet, even for Husserl, the conception of Phenomenology as a new method destined to supply a newfoundation for both philosophy and science developed only gradually and kept changing to the very end of his career. Trained as a mathematician, Husserl was attracted to philosophy by Franz Brentano, whose descriptive psychology seemed to offer a solid basis for a scientific philosophy. The concept of intentionality, the directedness of the consciousness toward an object, which is a basic concept in Phenomenology, was already present in Brentano's Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (1874): “And thus we can define psychic phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which, precisely as intentional, contain an object in themselves.”Brentano dissociated himself here from Sir William Hamilton, known for his philosophy of the “unconditioned,” who had attributed the character of intentionality to the realms of thought and desire only, to the exclusion of that of feeling.

The point of departure of Husserl's investigation is to be found in the treatise Der Begriff der Zahl (1887; “The Concept of Number”), which was later expanded into Philosophie der Arithmetik: Psychologische und logische Untersuchungen (1891). Numbers are not found ready-made in nature but result from a mental achievement. Here Husserl was preoccupied with the question of how something like the constitution of numbers ever comes about. This treatise is important to Husserl's later development for two reasons: first, because it contains the first traces of the concepts “reflection,” “constitution,” “description,” and the “founding constitution of meaning,” concepts that later played a predominant role in Husserl's philosophy; and second, because it reflected two events—(1) a criticism of his book by Gottlob Frege, a seminal thinker in logic, who had charged him with confusing logical and psychological considerations, and (2) Husserl's discovery of the Wissenschaftslehre (1837; Logic andScientific Methods, 1971) by Bernard Bolzano, a Bohemian mathematician, theologian,and social moralist, and his view concerning “truths in themselves”—which led Husserl to an analysis and critical discussion of psychologism, the view that psychology could be used as a foundation for pure logic, which he clearly felt to be no longer possible.

In the first volume of Logische Untersuchungen (1900–01; Logical Investigations, 1970), entitled Prolegomena, Husserl began with a criticism of psychologism. And yet he continued by conducting a careful investigation of the psychic acts in and through which logical structures are given; these investigations, too, could give the impression of being descriptive psychological investigations, though they were not conceived of in this way by the author. For the issue at stake was the discovery of the essential structure of these acts. Here Brentano's concept of intentionality received a richer and more refined signification. Husserl distinguished between perceptual and categorical intuition and stated that the latter's theme lies in logical relationships. The real concern of Phenomenology was clearly formulated for the first time in his Logos article, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” (1910–11; Philosophy as Rigorous Science, 1965). In this work Husserl wrestled with two unacceptable views: naturalism and historicism.

Naturalism attempts to apply the methods of the natural sciences to all other domains of knowledge, including the realm of consciousness. Reason becomes naturalized. Although an attempt is then made to find a foundation for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) by means of experimental psychology, it proves to be impossible, because in so doing one is unable to grasp precisely what is at stake in knowledge as found in the natural sciences.

What a philosopher must examine is the relationship between consciousness and Being; and in doing so, he must realize that from the standpoint of epistemology, Beingis accessible to him only as a correlate of conscious acts. He must thus pay careful attention to what occurs in these acts. This can be done only by a science that tries to understand the very essence of consciousness; and this is the task that Phenomenology has set for itself. Because clarification of the various types of objects must follow from the basic modes of consciousness, Husserl's thought remained close to psychology. In contradistinction to what is the case in psychology, however, in Phenomenology, consciousness is thematized in a very special and definite way, viz., just insofar as consciousness is the locus in which every manner of constituting and founding meaning must take place. In man's intuition, conscious occurrences must be given immediately in order to avoid introducing at the same time certain interpretations.The nature of such processes as perception, representation, imagination, judgment, and feeling must be grasped in immediate self-givenness. The call “To the things themselves” is not a demand for realism, because the things at stake are the acts of consciousness and the objective entities that get constituted in them: these things formthe realm of what Husserl calls the phenomena.

Thus, the objects of Phenomenology are “absolute data grasped in pure, immanent intuition,” and its goal is to discover the essential structures of the acts (noesis) and theobjective entities that correspond to them (noema).

On the other hand, Phenomenology must also be distinguished from historicism, a philosophy that stresses the immersion of all thinkers within a particular historical setting. Husserl objected to historicism because it implies relativism. He gave credit to Wilhelm Dilthey, author of “Entwürfe zur Kritik der historischen Vernunft” (“Outlines for the Critique of Historical Reason,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 12 vol. [1914–36], vol. 5, 6), for having developed a typification of world views, but he doubted and even rejected the skepticism that flows necessarily from the relativity of the various types. History is concerned with facts, whereas Phenomenology deals with the knowledge of essences.To Husserl, Dilthey's doctrine of world views was incapable of achieving the rigour required by genuine science. Contrary to all of the practical tendencies found in world views, Husserl demanded that philosophy be founded as a rigorous science. Its task implies that nothing be accepted as given beforehand but that the philosopher should try to find the way back to the real beginnings. This is tantamount to saying, however, that he must try to find the way to the foundations of meaning that are found in consciousness. Just as for Immanuel Kant the empirical has merely relative validity and never an absolute, or apodictic, validity, so for Husserl, too, what is to be searched for is a scientific knowledge of essences in contradistinction to a scientific knowledge of facts.
Origin and development of Husserl's Phenomenology

Basic method

The basic method of all Phenomenological investigation, as Husserl developed it himself—and on which he worked throughout his entire lifetime—is the “reduction”: the existence of the world must be put between brackets, not because the philospher should doubt it but merely because this existing world is not the very theme of Phenomenology; its theme is rather the manner in which knowledge of the world comes about. The first step of the reduction consists in the phenomenological reduction, through which all that is given is changed into a phenomenon in the sense of that which is known in and by consciousness; for this kind of knowing—which is to be taken in a very broad sense as including every mode of consciousness, such as intuition, recollection, imagination, and judgment—is here all-important. There are several reasons why Husserl gave a privileged position to intuition: among them is the fact that intuition is that act in which a person grasps something immediately in its bodily presence and also that it is a primordially given act upon which all of the rest is to be founded. Furthermore, Husserl's stress on intuition must be understood as a refutation of any merely speculative approach to philosophy.

This reduction reverses—“re-flects”—man's direction of sight from a straightforward orientation toward objects to an orientation toward consciousness.

The second step is to be found in the eidetic reduction. To get hold of consciousness is not sufficient; on the contrary, the various acts of consciousness must be made accessible in such a way that their essences—their universal and unchangeable structures—can be grasped. In the eidetic reduction one must forego everything that is factual and merely occurs in this way or that. A means of grasping the essence is the Wesensschau, the intuition of essences and essential structures. This is not a mysterious kind of intuition. Rather, one forms a multiplicity of variations of what is given, and while maintaining the multiplicity, one focusses attention on what remains unchanged in the multiplicity; i.e., the essence is that identical something that continuously maintains itself during the process of variation. Husserl, therefore, called it the invariant.

To this point, the discussion of reduction has remained within the realm of psychology, albeit a new—namely, a phenomenological—psychology. The second step must now be completed by a third, the transcendental reduction. It consists in a reversion to the achievements of that consciousness that Husserl, following Kant, called transcendental consciousness, although he conceived of it in his own way. The most fundamental event occurring in this consciousness is the creation of time awareness through the acts of protention (future) and retention (past), which is something like a self-constitution. To do phenomenology was for Husserl tantamount to returning to the transcendental ego as the ground for the foundation and constitution (or making) of all meaning (German Sinn). Only when a person has reached this ground can he achieve the insight that makes his comportment transparent in its entirety and makes him understand how meaning comes about, how meaning is based upon meaning like strata in a process of sedimentation.

Husserl worked on the clarification of the transcendental reduction until the very end of his life. It was precisely the further development of the transcendental reduction that ledto a division of the Phenomenological movement and to the formation of a school that refused to become involved in this kind of system of problems (see below Phenomenology of essences).


Basic concepts

In an effort to express what it is to which this method gives access, Husserl wrote:

In all pure psychic experiences (in perceiving something, judging about something, willing something, enjoying something, hoping for something, etc.) there is found inherently a being-directed-toward . . . . Experiences are intentional. This being-directed-toward is not just joined to the experience by way of a mere addition, and occasionally as an accidental reaction, as if experiences could be what they are without the intentional relation. With the intentionality of the experiences there announces itself, rather, the essential structure of the purely psychical.




The phenomenological investigator must examine the different forms of intentionality ina reflective attitude because it is precisely in and through the corresponding intentionality that each domain of objects becomes accessible to him. Husserl took as his point of departure mathematical entities and later examined logical structures, in order finally to achieve the insight that each being must be grasped in its correlation to consciousness, because each datum becomes accessible to a person only insofar asit has meaning for him. From this position, regional ontologies, or realms of being, develop: for instance, those dealing with the region of “nature,” the region of “the psychic,” or the region of “the spirit.” Moreover, Husserl distinguished formal ontologies—such as the region of the logical—from material ontologies.

In order to be able to investigate a regional ontology, it is first necessary to discover andexamine the founding act by which realities in this realm are constituted. For Husserl, constitution does not mean the creation or fabrication of a thing or object by a subject; itmeans the founding constitution of its meaning. There is meaning only for consciousness. All founding constitution of meaning is made possible by transcendental consciousness. Speaking of this transcendental motif, Husserl wrote:


It is the motif of questioning back to the last source of all achievements of knowledge, of reflection in which the knower reflects on himself and his knowing life, in which all the scientific constructs which have validity for him, occur teleologically, and as permanent acquisitions are kept and become freelyavailable to him.




In the realm of such transcendental problems, it is necessary to examine how all of the categories in and through which one understands mundane beings or purely formal entities originate from specific modes of consciousness. In Husserl's view, the temporalization must be conceived as a kind of primordial constitution of transcendental consciousness itself.

Understood in this way, Phenomenology does not place itself outside the sciences but,rather, attempts to make understandable what takes place in the various sciences and,thus, to thematize the unquestioned presuppositions of the sciences.

In his last publication, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (1936; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 1970), Husserl arrived at the life-world—the world as shaped within the immediate experience of each man—by questioning back to the foundations that the sciences presuppose. In Die Krisis he analyzed the grounds that had led to the European crisis of culture and philosophy, which found its immediate expression in thecontrast between the great successes of the sciences of nature and the failure of the sciences of man. In the modern era, scientific knowledge had become fragmented into an objectivistic-physicalist and a transcendental knowledge. Until recently this split could not be overcome. It led, rather, to the attempt to develop the sciences of man in accordance with the procedures used in the exact sciences of nature (naturalism)—an attempt doomed to failure. In opposition to this attempt, Husserl wished to show that in the new approach one must reflect on the activities of the scientists.


As the immediately given world, this merely subjective world, was forgotten in the scientific thematization, the accomplishing subject, too, was forgotten and the scientist himself was not thematized.




Husserl demonstrated this point by using the example of Galileo and his mathematization of our world. The truth characteristic of the life-world is by no means an inferior form of truth when compared to the exact, scientific truth but is, rather, alwaysa truth already presupposed in all scientific research. That is why Husserl claimed that an ontology of the life-world must be developed—i.e., a systematic analysis of the constitutive achievements the result of which is the life-world, a life-world that, in turn, isthe foundation of all scientific constitutions of meaning. The stimulating change that occurred here consists in the fact that truth is no longer measured after the criterion of an exact determination. For what is decisive is not the exactness but, rather, the part played by the founding act.

It is in this connection that, rather abruptly, historicity, too, became relevant for Husserl. He began to reflect upon the emergence of philosophy among the Greeks and on its significance as a new mode of scientific knowledge oriented toward infinity; and he interpreted the philosophy of René Descartes, often called the father of modern philosophy, as the point at which the split into the two research directions—physicalist objectivism and transcendental subjectivism—came about. Phenomenology must overcome this split, he held, and thus help mankind to live according to the demands ofreason. In view of the fact that reason is the typical characteristic of man, mankind mustfind itself again through Phenomenology.
Conclusion

At the turn of the fourth quarter of the 20th century, it remained to be seen whether Phenomenology could make solid contributions to philosophical knowledge. To this end, it needed to develop rigorous standards, which had not always been observed by some of its most brilliant practitioners, such as Max Scheler, and which were likely to be violated in a philosophy the ultimate appeal of which had to be made to intuitive verification. With this proviso, Phenomenology may well be qualified not only to becomea bridge for better international communication in philosophy but also to shed new lighton philosophical problems old and new, to reclaim for philosophy parts of man's quotidian world that have been abandoned by science as too private and too subjective,and, finally, to give access to layers of man's experience unprobed in everyday living, thus providing deeper foundations for both science and life.


Metaphysics
the philosophical study whose object is to determine the real nature of things—to determine the meaning, structure, and principles of whatever is insofar as it is. Although this study is popularly conceived as referring to anything excessively subtle and highly theoretical and although it has been subjected to many criticisms, it is presented by metaphysicians as the most fundamental and most comprehensive of inquiries, inasmuch as it is concerned with reality as a whole.

Nature and scope of metaphysics

Origin of the term

Etymologically the term metaphysics is unenlightening. It means “what comes after physics”; it was the phrase used by early students of Aristotle to refer to the contents ofAristotle's treatise on what he himself called “first philosophy,” and was used as the title of this treatise by Andronicus of Rhodes, one of the first of Aristotle's editors. Aristotle had distinguished two tasks for the philosopher: first, to investigate the nature and properties of what exists in the natural, or sensible, world, and second, to explore the characteristics of “Being as such” and to inquire into the character of “the substance that is free from movement,” or the most real of all things, the intelligible reality on which everything in the world of nature was thought to be causally dependent. The first constituted “second philosophy” and was carried out primarily in the Aristotelian treatise now known as the Physica; the second, which Aristotle had also referred to as “theology” (because God was the unmoved mover in his system), is roughly the subject matter of his Metaphysica. Modern readers of Aristotle are inclined to take both the Physica and the Metaphysica as philosophical treatises; the distinction their titles suggest between an empirical and a conceptual inquiry has little foundation. Aristotle was not indifferent to factual material either in natural or in metaphysical philosophy, but equally he was not concerned in either case to frame theories for empirical testing. It seems clear, nevertheless, that if the two works had to be distinguished, the Physica would have to be described as the more empirical, just because it deals with things that are objects of the senses, what Aristotle himself called “sensible substance”; the subject matter of the Metaphysica, “that which is eternal, free of movement, and separately existent,” is on any account more remote. It isalso evident that the connection marked in the original titles is a genuine one: the inquiries about nature carried out in the Physica lead on naturally to the more fundamental inquiries about Being as such that are taken up in the Metaphysica and indeed go along with the latter to make up a single philosophical discipline.

The background to Aristotle's divisions is to be found in the thought of Plato, with whomAristotle had many disagreements but whose basic ideas provided a framework within which much of his own thinking was conducted. Plato, following the early Greek philosopher Parmenides, who is known as the father of metaphysics, had sought to distinguish opinion, or belief, from knowledge and to assign distinct objects to each. Opinion, for Plato, was a form of apprehension that was shifting and unclear, similar to seeing things in a dream or only through their shadows; its objects were correspondingly unstable. Knowledge, by contrast, was wholly lucid; it carried its own guarantee against error, and the objects with which it was concerned were eternally what they were, and so were exempt from change and the deceptive power to appear tobe what they were not. Plato called the objects of opinion phenomena, or appearances; he referred to the objects of knowledge as noumena (objects of the intelligence) or quite simply as realities. Much of the burden of his philosophical message was to call men's attentions to these contrasts and to impress them with the necessity to turn away from concern with mere phenomena to the investigation of true reality. The education of the Platonic philosopher consisted precisely in effecting this transition: he was taught to recognize the contradictions involved in appearances and to fix his gaze on the realities that lay behind them, the realities that Plato himself calledForms, or Ideas. Philosophy for Plato was thus a call to recognize the existence and overwhelming importance of a set of higher realities that ordinary men—even those, like the Sophists of the time, who professed to be enlightened—entirely ignored. That there were such realities, or at least that there was a serious case for thinking that there were, was a fundamental tenet in the discipline that later became known as metaphysics. Conversely, much of the subsequent controversy about the very possibility of metaphysics has turned on the acceptability of this tenet and on whether, if it is rejected, some alternative foundation can be discovered on which the metaphysician can stand.


Characterizations of metaphysics

Before considering any such question, however, it is necessary to examine, without particular historical references, some ways in which actual metaphysicians have attempted to characterize their enterprise, noticing in each case the problems they havein drawing a clear line between their aims and those of the practitioners of the exact and empirical sciences. Four views will be briefly considered; they present metaphysics as: (1) an inquiry into what exists, or what really exists; (2) the science of reality, as opposed to appearance; (3) the study of the world as a whole; (4) a theory of first principles. Reflection on what is said under the different heads will quickly establish that they are not sharply separate from one another, and, indeed, individual metaphysical writers sometimes invoke more than one of these phrases when asked to say what metaphysics is—as, for example, the British Idealist F.H. Bradley does in the opening pages of his work Appearance and Reality (1893).

Types of metaphysical theory

To complement and, in a way, to correct this brief survey of the problems of metaphysics it will be useful at this point to insert a short summary of a number of overall metaphysical positions. Metaphysics, as already noted, professes to deal with “the world as a whole”; the thoughts of a metaphysician, if they are to make any impact at all, must be connected in a system. The object in what follows will be to present in outline metaphysical systems that have exercised and, indeed, continue to exercise a strong intellectual appeal. In all cases but one, these systems were given classical shape by particular philosophers of genius. Relatively little attention, however, will be paid to this fact here because the present concern is with types of view rather than with views actually held. Thus, reference will be made to Platonism instead of to the philosophy of Plato, and so on in other cases.


Platonism

The essence of Platonism lies in a distinction between two worlds, the familiar world ofeveryday life, which is the object of the senses, and an unseen world of true realities, which can be the object of the intellect. The ordinary man recognizes the existence of the former and ignores that of the latter; he fails to appreciate the extent to which his beliefs both about fact and about values are arbitrarily assumed and involve internal contradictions. The philosopher is in a position to show him how insubstantial is the foundation on which he takes his stand. The philosopher can demonstrate how little thought there is in popular conceptions of good and evil, and he can show that the very concept of sense knowledge involves difficulties because knowledge presupposes a stable object, and the objects of sense are constantly changing. The claim, however, is that he can do more than this. Because of the presence in him of something like a divine spark, he can, after suitable preparation, fix his intellectual gaze on the realities of the unseen world and, in the light of them, know both what is true and how to behave.He will not attain this result easily—to get to it will involve not only immense intellectual effort, including the repeated challenging of assumptions, but also turning his back on everything in life that is merely sensual or animal. Yet, despite this, the end is attainable in principle, and the man who arrives at it will exercise the most important part of himself in the best way that is open to him.

That this type of view has an immediate appeal to persons of a certain kind goes without saying. There is ample evidence in poetry and elsewhere of the frequently experienced sense of the unreality of familiar things and the presence behind them of another order altogether. Platonism may be said to build on “intuitions” of this kind; as a metaphysics, its job is to give them intellectual expression, to transfer them from the level of sentiment to that of theory. It is important, however, to notice that Platonism is not just the intellectualizing of a mood; it is an attempt to solve specific problems in a specific way. In Plato's own case, the problems were set by loss of confidence in traditional morality and the emergence of the doctrine that “man is the measure of all things.” Plato thought he could counter this doctrine by appeal to another contemporary fact, the rise of science as shown in the development of mathematical knowledge. Mathematics, as he saw it, offered certain truth, although not about the familiar world; the triangle whose properties were investigated by the geometrician was not any particular triangle but the prototype that all particular triangles presuppose. The triangleand the circle belonged not to the world of the senses but to the world of the intelligence; they were Forms. If this could be said of the objects of mathematical discourse, the same should also be true of the objects of morality. True justice and truegoodness were not to be found in popular opinions or human institutions but should be seen as unchanging Forms, eternally existing in a world apart.

Modern philosophers have found much to criticize in this system: as indicated already, they have objected that Forms are not so much existents as abstractions, and they have found the argument from science to morality quite inconclusive because of what they allege to be an absolute dichotomy between fact and value. It may be that nobody today can subscribe to Platonism in precisely the form given it by Plato himself. The general idea, however, has certainly not lost its hold, nor have the moral perplexities to which Plato hoped to find an answer been dissipated by further thought.

Aristotelianism

For many people, Plato is the type of an other-worldly, Aristotle of a this-worldly philosopher. Plato found reality to lie in things wholly remote from sense; Aristotle took form to be typically embodied in matter and thought it his job as a philosopher to make sense of the here and now. The contrast is to some extent overdrawn for Aristotle, too, believed in pure form (God and the astral intelligences—the intelligent movers of the planets—were supposed to satisfy this description), and Plato was sufficiently concerned with the here and now to want to change human society radically. It remains true, nevertheless, that Aristotelianism is in essentials a form of immanent metaphysics, a theory that instructs men on how to take the world they know rather thanone that gives them news of an altogether different world.

The key concepts in Aristotelianism are substance, form and matter, potentiality and actuality, and cause. Whatever happens involves some substance or substances; unless there were substances, in the sense of concrete existents, nothing could be real whatsoever. Substances, however, are not, as the name might suggest, mere parcels of matter; they are intelligible structures, or forms, embodied in matter. That a thing is of a certain kind means that it has a certain form or structure. But the structure as conceived in Aristotelianism is not merely static. Every substance, in this view, not only has a form but is, as it were, striving to attain its natural form; it is seeking to be in actuality what it is potentially, which is in effect to be a proper specimen of its kind. Because this is so, explanation in this system must be given in teleological rather than mechanical terms. For Aristotle, form is the determining element in the universe, but it operates by drawing things on, so that they become what they have it in themselves to be rather than by acting as a constant efficient cause (i.e., the agent that initiates the process of change). The notion of an efficient cause has a role in Aristotelianism—as Aristotle put it, it takes a man, a developed specimen of his kind, to beget a man; it is, however, a subordinate role and yields pride of place to a different idea, namely, form considered as purpose.

For reasons connected with his astronomy, Aristotle postulated a God. His God, however, had nothing to do with the universe; it was not his creation, and he was, of necessity, indifferent to its vicissitudes (he could not otherwise have been an unmoved mover). It is a mistake to imagine that everything in the Aristotelian universe is trying to fulfill a purpose that God has ordained for it. On the contrary, the teleology of which use is here made is unconscious; although things all tend to an end, they do not in general consciously seek that end. They are like organs in a living body that fulfill a function andyet seemingly have not been put there for that purpose.

As this last remark will suggest, an important source of Aristotelian thought is reflectionon natural growth and decay. Aristotle, who was the son of a doctor, was himself a pioneer in natural history, and it is not surprising that he thought in biological terms. What is surprising, and gives his system a continuing interest, is the extent to which he succeeded in applying ideas in fields that are remote from their origin. He was without doubt more successful in some fields than in others: in dealing with the phenomena ofsocial life, for instance, as opposed to those of physical reality. His results overall, however, were impressive enough for his system not only to dominate men's minds formany centuries but to constitute a challenge even today. Men still, on occasions, think like Aristotle, and, as long as that is so, Aristotelianism will remain a live metaphysical option.


Thomism

The advent of Christianity had important effects in philosophy as in other aspects of human life. Initially Christians were opposed to philosophical claims of any kind; they saw philosophy as an essentially pagan phenomenon and refused to allow the propriety of subjecting Christian dogma to philosophical scrutiny. Christian truth rested on revelation and did not need any certificate of authenticity from mere reason. Later, however, attempts were made to produce a specifically Christian metaphysics, to think out a view of the universe and of man's place in it that did justice to the Christian revelation and nevertheless rested on arguments that might be expected to convince Christians and non-Christians alike. St. Thomas Aquinas was only one of a number of important thinkers in medieval times who produced Christian philosophies; others—such as the philosophers John Duns Scotus in the late 13th century and William of Ockham in the first half of the 14th century—took significantly different views. In selecting the system of Aquinas for summary here, the factor that has weighed most has been its persistent influence, particularly in postmedieval times. Aquinas was not the only medieval philosopher of distinction, but Thomism is alive as other medieval systems are not.

The central claim of Thomism is that reflection on everyday things and the everyday world reveals it as pointing beyond itself to God as its sustaining cause. Ordinary existents, such as human beings, are in process of constant change. The change, however, is not normally the result of their own efforts, and even when it is, it does not depend on them exclusively. No object in the familiar world can fully account for its own esse (i.e., its own act of existing), nor is it wholly self-sufficient; all are affected from without, or at least operate in an environment that is not of their own making. To say this is to say that they are one and all finite. Although finite things can be, and commonly are, stimulated to activity or kept in activity by other finite things, it does not follow that there might be finite things and nothing else. On the contrary, the finite necessarily points beyond itself to the infinite; the system of limited beings, each dependent for its activity on something else of the same kind, demands for its completion the existence of an unlimited being, one that is the source of change in other things but is not subject to change itself. Such a being would be not a cause like any other but a first or ultimate cause; it would be the unconditioned condition of the existence of all other things. Aquinas believed that human reason can produce definitive proofs of the existence of an infinite or perfect being, and he had no hesitationin identifying that being with the Christian God. Because, however, the movement of histhought was from finite to infinite, he claimed to possess only so much philosophical knowledge of the Creator as could be arrived at from study of his creation. Positive knowledge of the divine nature was not available; apart from revelation, man could only say what God is not, or conceive of his attributes by the imperfect method of analogy.

Aquinas worked out his ideas at a time when the philosophy of Aristotle was again becoming familiar in western Europe after a period of being largely forgotten, and manyof his detailed theories show Aristotelian influence. He assumed the general truth of the Aristotelian picture of the natural world and the general correctness of Aristotle's way of interpreting natural phenomena. He also took over many of Aristotle's ideas in the fields of ethics and politics. He gave the latter, however, a distinctively different twist by making the final end of man not philosophical contemplation but the attainment of the beatific vision of God; it was Christian rather than Greek ideas that finally shaped his view of the summum bonum (“greatest good”). Similarly, his celebrated proofs of God's existence proceeded against a background that is obviously Aristotelian but that need not be presupposed for their central thought to have validity. Thomism can certainly be seen, and historically must be seen, as the system of Aristotle adapted to Christian purposes. It is important, however, to stress that the adaptation resulted in something new, a distinctive way of looking at the world that still has its adherents and still commands the respect of philosophers.

Cartesianism

René Descartes worked out his metaphysics at a time of rapid advance in human understanding of the physical world. He adopted from Galileo the view that physical things are not what they are commonly taken to be on the strength of sense experience—namely, possessors of “secondary” properties such as colour, smell, andfeel—but are rather objects characterized only by the “primary” qualities of shape, size, mass, and mobility. To understand why a constituent of the physical world behaves as it does, what should be asked is where it is, how large it is, in what direction it is moving, and at what speed; once these questions are answered, its further properties will become intelligible. Descartes held further that all change and movement in the physical world is to be explained in purely mechanical terms. God was needed to give initial impetus to the physical system as a whole, but once it had got going it proceededof its own accord. To pretend, as the Aristotelians had, to discern purposes in nature was to make the impious claim to insight into God's mind. Descartes applied this theory to the movements of animals as much as to those of inanimate bodies; he thought of both as mere automatons, pushed and pulled about by forces over which they had no control.

Although Descartes thus acquiesced in, indeed emphasized, the mechanistic tendencies of contemporary science, he was far from being a Materialist. Besides material substance there was also thinking substance, and this was in fact wholly different from matter both in kind and in operation. Bodies had as their essence to occupy space; minds were not in space at all. Bodies, again, were determined in their movements; minds were in some sense free, because they possessed will as well as intelligence. Descartes was less explicit on this point than he might have been; the principles on which mental substance is supposed to operate are not made clear, with the result that critics have said that Descartes thought of mental activities in para-mechanical terms. Whether this is true or not, however, there was no reason for Descartes to be in any special difficulty over this point. All he needed to urge was that minds act in the strict sense of the term, which is to say that they take cognizance of their situation and respond more or less intelligently to it. That they can do this differentiates them fundamentally from material things, which are caused to do what they do and are entirely unaffected by rational considerations.

The main crux in Descartes's metaphysics was the difficulty of bringing together the twoorders of being, once they were separated. Mention has already been made of the expedient to which later Cartesians were driven in trying to solve this difficulty: in effect, they made the unity of the universe a continuing miracle, dependent upon the grace of God. It is worth mentioning here another move in the same area that many have found instructive. Kant, who was in some respects both a latterday Cartesian and a latter-day Platonist, argued that human activities could be looked at from two points of view. Fromthe theoretical standpoint they were simply a set of happenings, brought about by antecedent events in precisely the same way as occurrences in the natural world. Fromthe standpoint of the agent, however, they must be conceived as the product of rational decision, as acts proper for which the agent could be held responsible. The moment he began to act, a man transferred himself in thought from the phenomenal world of science to an intelligible world of pure spirit; he necessarily acted as if he were not determined by natural forces. The transference, however, was a transference in thoughtonly (to claim any knowledge of the intelligible world was quite unjustified), and because of this the problem of the unity of the universe was dissolved. There was no contradiction in a man's thinking of himself both as a subject for science and as a free originator of action. Contradiction would appear only if he were present in both respectsin an identical capacity. But appeal to the doctrine of the two standpoints was thought by Kant to rule this out.

It is only with some hesitation that one can speak of Kant as having put forward a metaphysics. He was in general highly suspicious of claims to metaphysical knowledge, and a principal aim of his philosophy was to expose the confusions into which professing metaphysicians had fallen. Nevertheless, it is clear that Kant had metaphysical convictions, for all his denial of the possibility of metaphysical knowledge; he was committed to the view that men can conceive a non-natural as well as a natural order and must necessarily take the former to be real when they act. The language he used—particularly his talk about man as phenomenon and man as noumenon—is not to the taste of present-day philosophers, but the thought behind it certainly survives. It is in this form, indeed, that Cartesianism may still be said to present a serious intellectual challenge.


Idealism

Descartes and Kant were both adherents of metaphysical dualism, though they workedout their dualisms in interestingly different ways. Many thinkers, however, find dualism unsatisfactory in itself; they look for a single principle by which to compass whatever exists. There are two broad steps that are open to the person who confronts a dualism of mind and matter and finds it unsatisfactory: he can either try to show that matter is in some sense reducible to mind, or conversely seek to reduce mind to matter. The first isthe solution of Idealism, the second that of Materialism. Idealism has already been treated at length, and it will not be necessary to go into it again here. Only one point about it needs emphasis. As was pointed out, there are various forms of Idealism. In one version, this philosophy maintains that there literally is no such thing as matter; what the common man takes to be material things are, upon closer consideration, nothing but experiences in minds. Nothing exists but minds and their contents; an independently existing material world is strictly no more than an illusion. This was the view taken by Berkeley. In the more sophisticated Idealism of Hegel, however, it is not maintained that mind alone exists; material things are, in one way, taken to be as real as minds. The thesis advanced is rather that the universe must be seen as penetrated by mind, indeed as constituted by it. Spirit, to use Hegel's own word, is the fundamentalreality, and everything that exists must accordingly be understood by reference to it, either as being directly explicable in spiritual terms or as prefiguring or pointing forwardto spirit. Whatever the merits of this thesis, it is clear that it differs radically from that maintained by Berkeley. Idealism in the form espoused by Berkeley relies largely on arguments drawn from epistemology, though formally its conclusions are ontological, because they take the form of assertions or denials of existence. Hegel, however, had little or nothing to say about epistemology and was not even concerned to put forward an ontology. What he wanted to urge was a doctrine of first principles, a thesis about the terms in which to understand the world. The Hegelian “reduction” of matter to mind was thus reduction in a somewhat attenuated sense. It is important to get this point clear, if only because it has its parallel in the rival doctrine of Materialism.

Materialism

The simplest form of Materialism is found in the claim that only matter exists. Stated thus baldly the claim is absurd, because it is clear that all sorts of things exist that are not of the nature of matter: thoughts and numbers and human institutions would be instances. In the light of these facts, the claim has to be revised to say that matter is theonly substantial existent, with appeal being made to distinctions first worked out in Aristotle's doctrine of categories. According to this explanation, many things besides matter exist, but all of them are explicable (or so it is said) as modifications of matter. Thus, human institutions consist in patterns of movement among specific groups of human beings, and human beings in turn are nothing but highly complicated material bodies.

It is clear from these instances that Materialism is a controversial doctrine; it is also clear that its key word, modification, requires further explanation. When, for example, minds are said to be modifications of an underlying material substance, what is meant? A first and relatively easy point is that, like qualities and quantities, they could not exist separately. Unless there were material bodies, there could not be minds, because minds are—to put it crudely—states found in some material bodies. Minds are here equated with mentality, and mentality is clearly an abstraction. To say this, however, is not to remove the whole difficulty. When it is said that mentality is a state of some material body or bodies, is that meant literally or metaphorically? Bodies can often be described from the physical point of view as being in a certain state—for example, as being in a state of internal equilibrium. What is meant here is that the different particles of matter concerned stand in a certain relationship and as a consequence develop certain physical properties. But is mentality to be conceived as a physical property? It sounds extravagant to say so. Yet some such doctrine must be defended if Materialism is to be advanced as a form of ontology with a serious claim forattention. It is interesting in this connection to notice the arguments advanced by scholars like J.J.C. Smart, which purport to identify states of mind with states of the brain. If the two are identical—literally the same thing described from two points of view—thoughts may really be modifications of matter, and Materialism may be tenable in a strong form. If, however, the identity cannot be made out—and very few philosophers are in fact ready to accept it—Materialism can be true at most in a modified form.

This modified form of Materialism is perhaps better described as naturalism. Naturalism holds not that all things consist of matter or its modifications but that whatever exists can be satisfactorily explained in natural terms. To explain something in natural terms is to explain it on scientific lines; naturalism is in fact a proclamation of the omnicompetence, or final competence, of science. It is not essential to this type of view to argue that phenomena can be spoken of in one way only; on this point, as on the point about ontological reducibility, the theory can afford to be liberal. It is, however, vital to make out that the scientific account of a set of happenings takes precedence over any other. Thus, the language in which men commonly speak of action and decision, which may be called for short the language of reasons, must be held to be secondary to the language in which scientists might speak of the same facts. Scientific language is basically causal, and the thesis of this form of Materialism is that causal explanations are fundamental. Naturalism is thus the obverse of Hegelianism; it is a theory of first principles, and it draws its principles from science.

If the question is raised why anyone should take this form of Materialism seriously, the answer lies in a number of significant facts. Physiologists have established correlations between general states of mind and general states of brain activity; their hope is to extend this to the point where particular thoughts and feelings can be shown to have their physiological counterpart. Cyberneticists have produced artifacts that exhibit mindlike behaviour to a remarkable degree; the inference that man is no more than a complicated machine is certainly strengthened by their achievements. Sociologists have shown that, whatever the explicit reasons men give for their beliefs, these are often intelligible in the light of factors of which they themselves take little or noaccount. The old assumption that human judgments are typically grounded in reason rather than merely caused, is called in question by the results of such investigations, which gain support from findings both in Freudian and in orthodox psychology. None of this evidence is decisive by itself; there are ways in every case of blocking the conclusions that Materialists tend to draw from it. Yet it remains true that, cumulatively, the evidence is impressive. It certainly has enough force to make it necessary to take this type of theory with the greatest seriousness. Metaphysical disputes in the modern world are fundamentally arguments for or against Materialism, and the other types of theory here explored are all seen as alternatives to this compelling, if often unwelcome,view.
Criticisms of metaphysics

Metaphysics has many detractors. The man who aspires “to know reality as against mere appearance,” to use Bradley's description, is commonly taken to be a dreamer, a dupe, or a charlatan. Reality in this context is, by the metaphysician's own admission, something that is inaccessible to sense; as Plato explained, it can be discovered only by the pure intelligence, and only if the latter can shake itself free of bodily encumbrances. The inference that the metaphysical world is secret and mysterious is natural enough. Metaphysics in this view unlocks the mysteries and lets the ordinary man into the secrets. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a study of the occult.


Metaphysics as knowledge of the supersensible

That there are aspects of metaphysics that lend colour to this caricature can scarcely be denied. The language of Plato, in particular, suggests an absolute distinction between the deceitful world of appearances, which can never be an object of knowledge, and the unseen world of Forms, each of which is precisely what it appears to be. Plato urged his readers not to take seriously the things of sense; he told them that everything having to do with the senses, including the natural appetites and the life of the body, is unreal and unimportant. The philosopher, in his view, needs to live an ascetic life, the chief object of which is to cultivate his soul. Only if he does this, and follows a rigorous intellectual training, has he any hope of getting the eye of his soul fixed on true reality and so of understanding why things are what they are.

Yet even this program admits of an innocuous, or relatively innocuous, interpretation. The “dialectician,” as Plato called his metaphysical philosopher, is said in one place to be concerned to “give an account,” and the only things of which he can give an account are phenomena. Plato's interest, despite first appearances, was not in the unseen for its own sake; he proposed to go behind things visible in order to explain them. He was not so much disdainful of facts as critical of accepted opinions; his attack on the acquiescence in “appearances” was an attack on conventional wisdom. That this was so comes out nowhere more clearly than in the fact that his targets included not just beliefs about what there is but also beliefs about what is good. It is the opinions of the many that need correction and that can happen only if men penetrate behind appearances and lay hold on reality.

Plato is often presented as an enemy of science on the ground that he was bitterly opposed to Empiricism and because he said that, if there was ever to be progress in astronomy, the actual appearances of the starry heavens must be disregarded. He understood by Empiricism, however, the uncritical acceptance of apparent facts, with the attempt to trace regularities in them; it is an attitude that, in his view, is marked by the absence of thought. As for the starry heavens, it is certainly difficult to take Plato quite literally when he compares their function in astronomy to that of a well-drawn diagram in geometry. Yet he was not wrong to suggest that no progress could be madein astronomical inquiries until appearances were seen to be what they were and not taken for absolute realities. The subsequent progress of astronomy has shown this view to be entirely correct.

There are respects in which Plato's attitude to phenomena was precisely the same as that of the modern scientist. The fact remains, nevertheless, that he believed in a realmof unseen realities, and he is of course far from being the only metaphysician to do so. Many, if not quite all, metaphysicians are committed to claiming knowledge of the supersensible, in some degree at least; even Materialists are alleged to make this claim when they say that behind the familiar world of everyday experience there lies material substance that is not accessible to the senses. It has been a commonplace among critics of metaphysics since the early 18th century that no such claims can be justified; the supersensible cannot be known about, or even known of, whether directly or by inference.