Metaphysics

The big questions

1. Why is there something rather than nothing, and what is it for a thing to exist?
2. Are there universals, such as whiteness or justice, over and above the particular things that have them?
3. What makes a thing, or a person, the same over time when every part of it changes?
4. Is reality ultimately one kind of thing or many: matter, mind, both, or something beneath both?
5. What is a cause, and is everything that happens fixed in advance?
6. What does it mean to say that something could have been otherwise, or that it had to be?
7. Can metaphysical questions be answered at all, or do they outrun what reason and experience can settle?

Take a gold ring and the gold it is made of. They are in the same place and weigh the same, so they seem to be one thing. But melt the ring and the ring is gone while the gold remains, and nothing can outlast itself. So perhaps they are two things sharing every atom. No jeweller’s instrument will settle it. The question is what kind of thing a ring is, and what it takes for one thing to be another.

That is a question of metaphysics, the part of philosophy that asks what there is and what it is like at the most general level. Aristotle called it first philosophy; its core is often called ontology, the theory of being; in Hindi it is tattvamīmāṃsā, the examination of reality. The ring’s older cousin is the ship of Theseus, rebuilt plank by plank until no original timber was left.

What metaphysics asks

Aristotle opens Book IV of his Metaphysics with a definition: “There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature.” The special sciences cut off one part of being; this one studies what belongs to anything because it is. The title is an editor’s, probably Andronicus of Rhodes’, and means “the ones after the physical ones”: most likely the books to be read after the Physics.

In the seventeenth century the subject widened to take in mind and body, freedom and personal identity, and the word ontology was coined for the narrower study of being as such. Today it covers substance and universals, possibility, persistence, causation and free will, mind and matter, space and time. How we could know any of this is the business of epistemology.

Denying a metaphysical thesis is itself metaphysics. Sartre put it plainly in Situations III (1949), as the Stanford Encyclopedia quotes him: “I do not think myself any less a metaphysician in denying the existence of God than Leibniz was in affirming it.” A materialist has not left metaphysics. She has taken a position in it.

The main debates

Universals. A sheet of paper and the Taj Mahal are both white. Plato held that what they share is a form, whiteness itself, existing apart from both and more real than either (the theory of forms). Aristotle kept the universal but put it in the things. Nominalists deny there is any shared item: there are white things, and there is the word. Russell defended a view he called “largely Plato’s” in 1912, and the debate is still open.

What is basic. Descartes held that, besides God, there are two kinds of created substance, extended matter and thinking mind; Spinoza that there is only one, God or Nature; Leibniz that the world is made of countless simple substances, monads. Berkeley argued that for a sensible thing to be is to be perceived, so that matter as philosophers conceived it does not exist; materialists hold that everything is physical, minds included. These are the families of dualism, monism, idealism and materialism, and their quarrel over consciousness continues in the philosophy of mind.

Change and identity. Heraclitus is credited, in John Burnet’s translation, with the saying “You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” Parmenides argued that what is cannot have come from what is not, so that coming into being and passing away are impossible; his follower Zeno’s paradoxes were meant to defend him by showing that belief in many things and in motion leads to absurdity. Hume, looking inward for a self, wrote that he “never can catch myself at any time without a perception”, and concluded that a person is a bundle of perceptions. Whether a copied or paused mind is the same mind is the same question under new pressure.

Causes and possibility. Hume argued that we observe one kind of event regularly following another, never a necessary connection between them. If every event is fixed by earlier ones under the laws (the picture behind Laplace’s demon), it is hard to see how anyone could have done otherwise; if not, it is hard to see how chance makes our acts our own. What could have been otherwise is now often discussed in terms of possible worlds: for Saul Kripke and Alvin Plantinga abstract ways reality might be, for David Lewis concrete universes as real as ours.

A short history

After Aristotle, metaphysics became the cornerstone of philosophy in the Arabic tradition. Ibn Sīnā made the distinction between what a thing is and that it is his guiding thread, and held God to be the only being whose essence is identical with its existence; the Arabic model of metaphysics went on to shape Latin and Hebrew thought. Aquinas took metaphysics to be the study of being as such and worked it out through essence and existence, substance and accident, and matter and form.

Then came the doubts. Hume ended his Enquiry by asking of any volume “of divinity or school metaphysics” whether it reasoned about quantity or about matter of fact: “Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” Kant answered with an experiment: “Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition.” The result, transcendental idealism, allowed knowledge of the structure of possible experience and denied it of things in themselves.

In the 1930s the logical positivists, A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic (1936) among them, argued that metaphysical statements are meaningless because no experience could verify them. The best-known reply is that their own principle cannot be verified either. Metaphysics returned by several routes: Quine’s “On What There Is” (1948), which asked what our best theories commit us to; Strawson’s Individuals (1959), which set a “descriptive” metaphysics of the conceptual scheme we actually have against a “revisionary” one that would improve it; and the revival of modality by Kripke and Lewis. In another idiom, Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) sought to reawaken the question of being itself.

Metaphysics in other traditions

Parmenides’ question has a counterpart in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. Uddālaka tells his son that in the beginning there was “that only which is, one only, without a second”, and asks of those who say being arose from non-being, “how could it be thus?” The Vaiśeṣika school, traced to Kaṇāda, sorted everything that exists and can be named into six categories (padārtha): substance, quality, action, generality, particularity and inherence, to which later Vaiśeṣikas added non-existence. Material things, it held, are built of indivisible atoms.

Causation divided the schools. Sāṃkhya held that the effect already exists in its material cause (satkāryavāda), since what is not cannot be produced; Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika replied that the effect is a new beginning (asatkāryavāda). Advaita Vedānta, following Śaṅkara, holds that Brahman alone is real and the world has no existence apart from it, as the snake has none apart from the rope mistaken for it; Rāmānuja answered that the world is real, the body of Brahman. The Jains held that reality is many-sided, so that every one-sided description of it is partial (anekāntavāda).

Buddhist philosophers applied the analysis of wholes and parts to the self. In the chariot dialogue, the monk Nāgasena shows that “chariot” names no part and nothing beyond the parts, and that his own name works the same way (anattā). Nāgārjuna argued that nothing at all has intrinsic nature (śūnyatā). The Buddha himself, by the early accounts, declined to answer certain metaphysical questions as not conducive to liberation.

In Chinese philosophy, the cosmogonic texts from the mid-fourth century BCE present all things as interconnected and constantly changing, arising spontaneously from an ultimate source, most often called the dao. Franklin Perkins suggests that European metaphysics has tended to centre on reconciliation, how ontologically distinct things can interact, and Chinese metaphysics on distinction, what grounds the individuation of things. Zhu Xi gave pattern (li) priority over vital energy (qi) while denying that pattern exists apart from it.

What metaphysics means now

Metaphysicians now argue about grounding, the relation by which some facts hold in virtue of others; about what is fundamental; and, in social metaphysics, about what money, corporations, races and genders are. Old questions have new settings: whether a restored copy would be you (the teletransporter, or the lab’s digital ship of Theseus), and how the ontologies used in artificial intelligence should classify things.

The doubts remain. Some philosophers think disputes such as whether there are tables, or only particles arranged table-wise, are merely verbal; others think they concern the structure of the world; and there is no consensus on whether such criticisms touch the whole field or only some of its debates.

How to begin

Start with the first chapter of Russell’s Problems of Philosophy, where a table and a microscope open the gap between appearance and reality. Then the cave, the Chāndogya and Augustine on time; then Berkeley and Hume; Kant’s preface last. The reading path below sets them in order. For exam preparation, see the UGC NET and UPSC guides; for a survey of the whole field, the Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry.