Well, xzc, given your understanding of the term ‘metaphysics’, everything you have said makes a lot more sense now, and I have no major misagreements.
Great! I think it’s wortwhile to also point out Aristotle did not call the volume we today know as his Metaphysics “metaphysics.” It was Aristotle scholars who when trying to organize his writings called it that, because that work came after his Physics. The term did not originally mean that the subject of this discipline is the stuff that comes after the stuff of physics. It just meant that volume of work was written after another piece of work.
Yeah, that was the original meaning. We could add it to the list as a fifth meaning, but I don’t think those of us who toss the term around ever mean it that way
The distinct left brain and the right brain also lend to how we see the world. The left is scientific and things are only true if they can be measured. The right can experience what the left has not a language for.
I more or less agree. The only, very subtle, change I would make to your statement is to say that the left brain is based on rules whereas the right is more free-flowing. The right brain invents ideas and the left decides whether those ideas follow the rules that have been layd down for acceptance as truth or fact.
Real objects can become a nothingness and re-manifest as physical objects again, indeed the universe ‘arises’ from such. hence the need for metaphysics in terms of; [3] the study of a non physical nature and the cessation of an absolute. This also applies to real meaning, the more vague the nature of the real thing/item/idea being determined, the lesser the degree of ontology. Hence; what is the ontology of the indistinct in all contexts, especially where such an ontology would be the ultimate description of everything?
It seams to me that metaphysics holds within it such poetry of meaning and necessarily so.
Surely everything describable is physics or other kinds of objective truth?
It is called metaphysics becuase there are things beyond science. Or is the problem human intreptational ability and/or this faulty senory mechanism that is to say the human body, in which we manifest in. the actual problem… When we can not perceive,decifer or discover more; we regard it as something beyond science. When all along the problem is “us”.
I’m not really sure there’s anything to add to that…
My preference is to see it as an ‘about’ rather than a ‘beyond’. A commentary, a critique or a second-order discourse - rather than a theology, even of the negative kind.
But then there is “First Philosophy” Aristotles’ term for metaphysics.
“…In Book E, Aristotle adds another description to the study of the causes and principles of beings qua beings…there is still room for a science that studies things (if indeed there are any) that are eternal, not subject to change, and independent of matter. Such a science, he says, is theology, and this is the “first” and “highest” science. And (“the hardest and most perplexing of all,” Aristotle says) are unity and being the substance of things, or are they attributes of some other subject? In the remainder of Book B, Aristotle presents arguments on both sides of each of these issues, and in subsequent books he takes up many of them again. But it is not always clear precisely how he resolves them, and it is possible that Aristotle did not think that the Metaphysics contains definitive solutions to all of these perplexities …” re: plato.stanford.edu/entries/arist … taphysics/
If Aristotle did resolve the matter, I would like to know what that is? Strange how I think similarly without even reading his works, but I suppose it is obvious that the eternal and indistinct are ‘first philosophies’, the material and transient would surely derive of them.
metphysics is “beyond”. and not as '“after”. beyond as in an immeasurable, and unchanging immaterial substance. An absolute. An absolute that depends on nothing else to exist.
How can absolutes exist? I don’t mean just in terms of existing things, ~ even as non existent things.
I don’t think the eternal and indistinct are ‘beyond’, do they have to be? I think they are right here with us, its just that we don’t perceive them as we do the distinct and finite. Hence maybe we don’t have to look beyond, or to think of metaphysics as like other planes of reality.
Yes.
we can not say that absolutes exist or do not exist. And this is metaphysics. Metaphysics as Aristotles expounded - …"there is still room for a science that studies things (if indeed there are any) that are eternal, not subject to change, and independent of matter’…-Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a science. It is even the science of sciences, what seeks the first principles…
A principle is, for example, the soul. It is a principle in me in as much as I live; in other words, soul is the first principle in the order of life. It is at the heart of reality, even if it is neither concrete nor abstract.
Soul is also the first principle in the order of my existence. My soul is my substance but substance is not soul, else all that would be would live.
Metaphysics is a science. It is even the science of sciences, what seeks the first principles…
A principle is, for example, the soul. It is a principle in me in as much as I live; in other words, soul is the first principle in the order of life. It is at the heart of reality, even if it is neither concrete nor abstract.
Soul is also the first principle in the order of my existence. My soul is my substance but substance is not soul, else all that would be would live.
“It is a principle in me” –
Where does this thing called “me” exist and how does it have a soul in it?
And why are there two or are there three things .
Are “you” one thing, the body another and soul another?
And if the soul is eternal what happens to the thing you calll ‘me’.
The soul, is for example, when you have two different usernames, you are still you. You’re chuckling, but some people are persuaded that they live solely by their usernames, and if they are deleted, there is nothing beyond that. One must absolutely not tinker with their forum subscription, lest they have excruciating anguishes!
SvenHag is my concrete mode of existence. I also have an abstract mode of existence - dude - proceeding from singular concrete realities which I recognize as corresponfing to the generic term, “dude”. I could have also said I am a man, but I like the idea of homing in on a finer generic description of me. Now, SvenHag is not sitting behind his computer on the one hand, and dude doing push-ups on the other hand. It would be quite wrong to think so! SvenHag and dude describe the same reality (me) under two different angles - the concrete mode and the abstract mode. Now what unites these two modes, and can be induced, is my substance, which is neither concrete nor abstract. My substance is my soul. My soul leaves my Internet provider, when my different usernames are deleted.
What radically defines “me” is substance-principle (ie soul). Metaphysics seeks what is first in the order of existence, whereas a philosophy of the living we seek what is first in the order of life. It is the problem of the human person which shows the links between Being and life, intelligence naturally distunguishing them, without separating them, for there is no reason to resort to a silly dualism: it is evident that the body is also part of the person, but it is not first in its order, the soul is.
It seems to me metaphysics seeks to examine the human person not on the level of life and our vital operations, for we would never leave the viewpoint of biology and psychology, but on the level of Being… which has proven to be a bit confusing, since for us to exist is to live.
The soul, is for example, when you have two different usernames, you are still you. You’re chuckling, but some people are persuaded that they live solely by their usernames, and if they are deleted, there is nothing beyond that. One must absolutely not tinker with their forum subscription, lest they have excruciating anguishes!
SvenHag is my concrete mode of existence. I also have an abstract mode of existence - dude - proceeding from singular concrete realities which I recognize as corresponfing to the generic term, “dude”. I could have also said I am a man, but I like the idea of homing in on a finer generic description of me. Now, SvenHag is not sitting behind his computer on the one hand, and dude doing push-ups on the other hand. It would be quite wrong to think so! SvenHag and dude describe the same reality (me) under two different angles - the concrete mode and the abstract mode. Now what unites these two modes, and can be induced, is my substance, which is neither concrete nor abstract. My substance is my soul. My soul leaves my Internet provider, when my different usernames are deleted.
What radically defines “me” is substance-principle (ie soul). Metaphysics seeks what is first in the order of existence, whereas a philosophy of the living we seek what is first in the order of life. It is the problem of the human person which shows the links between Being and life, intelligence naturally distunguishing them, without separating them, for there is no reason to resort to a silly dualism: it is evident that the body is also part of the person, but it is not first in its order, the soul is.
It seems to me metaphysics seeks to examine the human person not on the level of life and our vital operations, for we would never leave the viewpoint of biology and psychology, but on the level of Being… which has proven to be a bit confusing, since for us to exist is to live.
“to exist is to live”.
the primary is consciousness or spirit or soul or god or mind or love and this primary holds metaphysical primacy over existence. existence as if to say EVERYTHING>
From this deduce that seperate individual souls, dudes, or what ever else thinks (however it thinks) that it is a lving, me or mine are only part of it. Not seperate