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Category
Topics in metaphysics
Summary
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality. This includes the first principles of: being or existence, identity, change, space and time, cause and effect, necessity, actuality, and possibility.
Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics.
It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.
Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and fully general manner, the questions of: What is that exists; and What is like.
The word "metaphysics" derives from the Greek words μετά (metá, "after") and φυσικά (physiká, "physics"). It has been suggested that the term might have been coined by a first century CE editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle's works into the treatise we now know by the name Metaphysics (μετὰ τὰ φυσικά, meta ta physika, 'after the Physics ' – another of Aristotle's works). The prefix meta- ("after") indicates that these works come "after" the chapters on physics. Aristotle himself did not call the subject of his books "metaphysics"; he referred to it as "first philosophy" (πρώτη φιλοσοφία; philosophia prima). The editor of Aristotle's works, Andronicus of Rhodes, is thought to have placed the books on first philosophy right after another work, Physics, and called them τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ βιβλία (tà metà tà physikà biblía) or "the books [that come] after the [books on] physics".
However, once the name was given, the commentators sought to find other reasons for its appropriateness. For instance, Thomas Aquinas understood it to refer to the chronological or pedagogical order among our philosophical studies, so that the "metaphysical sciences" would mean "those that we study after having mastered the sciences that deal with the physical world".
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