On the home page of the Metaphysics Research Lab (MRL) at Stanford, the following passage can be found in the introductory paragraph:
The MRL is an obvious attempt to “rescue” the ancient term, metaphysics, from the popular, “bastardized” version, which is a kind of mystical, sometimes paranoid, world-view. In order to do this, they presuppose the “object,” which may have the character of either “concreteness” or “abstraction.” It is through these “abstract objects” that they seek to discover the myriad of “systematic laws” that govern them.
It is not their attempt to discover how it is that objectivity-ness may at all come to be understood. Rather, it is implicitly taken for granted that the concept of “dealing with objects” is the fundamental mode of being. As a result, the unspoken view of the MRL is that being itself is simply an “object knowing and manipulating modality”.
The laughable ridiculousness of the “methodology” of the MRL becomes patently obvious when they continue on to say:
They view ontology as the simple “logical ordering” of objects. This definition could not be more absurd. The fact that they use the descriptor “abstract” is wholly meaningless in the context of ontological inquiry. The fact is that they leave the question of subjectivity completely unasked.
It should be painfully obvious to anyone with even the slightest exposure to philosophical inquiry that the MRL, in terms of true ontological inquiry, is a massive sham! Ontology is a questioning concerning being. It is an attempt to come to the root of all possible subjectivity and objectivity. Therefore, to simply speak to a kind of “pre-physics” while failing to consider the various modes of being which characterize the totality of our world-experience is a philosophical failure of massive proportions.
Please see my website for the correct way in which to question ontologically.
The Metaphysics Research Lab: Ontology is an investigation of the “laws” that govern abstract objects.
Me: Ontology is an inquiry into the meaning of being.
Etymological definitions:
Ontos = being
-ology = a logical inquiry
In other words, being is the a priori grounds of all forms of subject-object relativism. In my essay First Metaphysics: Finishing the Heideggerean Project, I describe how the temporal universe is used to derive all possible forms of physicalistic ways of thinking.
This definition is well and good, but it is wholly meaningless if one doesn’t explicitly define what this “underlying nature of reality” is. First of all, the term “reality” is an empty catch phrase that leads us nowhere. I prefer to take a clue from the term “Metaphysics” itself and use the term “physicalism” in its place. Therefore, metaphysics is the discipline that deals with the underlying nature of physicalism.
So what is its underlying nature? Again, in the essay cited above, I describe how the paradigm of spatial dimensionality lies at the heart of all possible forms of physicalism. I show how the common conception of time is nothing other than the primary spatial dimension (which I call t-spatiality) that serves as the a priori grounds of the remaining 3 spatial dimensions (the xyz-spatiality of “world space”).
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