This is Metaphysics 101, where we learn the Catholic approach to the philosophy of being: what it means to exist, how things change, and how we should understand the foundation of all being: God. This is a free post, but to supercharge your learning and help create more episodes like these, upgrade your subscription.
It is popular amongst some internet intellectuals to dunk on metaphysics, even though they often betray more or less a total, or at least a functional, lack of knowledge of what metaphysics is.
Many people think of metaphysics as some kind of study of magical or mystical experiences in the world. If you say you are getting into “metaphysical studies,” and you are not a philosopher, there is a pretty good chance that you mean you are trying to understand how stars affect your actions, or how ghosts can do things for you. But this is not at all what philosophers think of when they are talking about metaphysics.
Unfortunately, however, even philosophically minded people sometimes have a bad view of metaphysics. On this understanding, they think of metaphysics as ungrounded, poorly contrived theories about spiritual entities. On this view, metaphysics cannot be falsified, cannot be tested, and therefore is completely useless, aside from being the haven of liars, sophists and dreamers.
Hume exemplifies this approach quite well when he lays out his famous test for whether a book is worth studying:
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
So, since metaphysics contains reasoning that goes beyond mathematics and empirical science, it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.1
So, to summarize, many people think that metaphysics is either a) mystery and magic or b) made-up sophistry and illusion (or both, depending on what you think of magic).
But neither has anything to do with the classical view of metaphysics.
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The Role of Metaphysics in Philosophy
Metaphysics is a word used to describe the area of philosophy outlined by Aristotle in his book, the “Metaphysics.” But Aristotle did not coin the word; “metaphysics” is really meant to simply mean “beyond physics.”
In what sense is metaphysics “beyond physics?” To understand this, we need first to define physics. Loosely, physics is the study of how physical bodies interact. How they move, how they move other beings, and what happens when they change.
Metaphysics is concerned with what makes such things possible in the first place. Where physics asks how objects move, metaphysics asks what movement is, and what it means to be an object. Where physics asks how things change, metaphysics asks what change is in the first place, and if it is possible for an object to change while maintaining identity.
While figuring out the answers to these questions is difficult, it is obvious that a question like “what does it mean to say something exists?” has an answer. Similarly, the question “what does it mean to say that something has changed?” may be difficult, and you might even argue that it is badly formulated, but there is clearly some kind of answer.
The Method of Metaphysics
One concern that many people have about metaphysics is that its method is not experimental or empirical. Where empirical scientists experiment, observe and conclude, metaphysicians2 tend to arrive at metaphysical truths through conceptual reasoning. They are concerned with first principles, or the layer of reality upon which everything else is dependent.
The reason this concerns certain people is that it feels un-falsifiable; how would we prove that, for example, a claim about change is false?
But a lack of empirical experimentation is hardly a sign of a lack of falsification; after all, math is independent of experimentation, too. Here are a few methods metaphysicians use to discern what is true in metaphysics.
1. Empirical Observation
It is actually a common method to compare metaphysical claims against empirical observation. For example, there have been philosophers who have claimed that change is literally impossible. Parmenides is a famous example. But while philosophers might have occasionally had trouble answering Parmenides’ arguments, few have followed his conclusion due to the obvious rejoinder that things sure seem to be changing all the time.
While it is not usually possible for certain questions to be answered merely with empirical observation, that observation is the foundation of all good metaphysics. But we cannot end there!
2. Logical Reasoning
When metaphysicians advance arguments, a common method used is discerning whether the logical implications of an argument are a) possible and b) plausible.
It is sometimes the case that an argument leads to direct contradictions. When this occurs, you know the argument is false, and that the claim thereby made by the argument is untenable. But even if the argument is not obviously contradictory, it is still possible to do metaphysics in a way that seeks to cohere with the way the world generally appears to us, and so reject arguments when they are not plausible.
One example is mereological universalism. Mereology is interested in when adding objects together makes a new object. But the mereological universalist holds that, for any two (or more) items, including whatever is the fundamental particle (often called “simples”), those items create an object.
This means that your dog is an object because he is made of a whole collection of objects. So that makes sense. But the universalist also holds that your dog plus Saturn is just as much an object as the dog by himself.
For many people, this conclusion is simply too implausible to accept. On those grounds, it is rejected by many.
3. Comparative Analysis
But what if you have two theories that both make implausible claims? Here, metaphysicians typically try to do two things: first, they might show how a seemingly implausible claim is actually not as implausible as it seems because it supports many other beliefs that we hold.
The other option is show that the other theory is even more implausible than their own. Maybe their theory makes morality impossible. Or it implies that we do not exist in any sense. Or maybe it makes me morally responsible for the acts of a con man in Indonesia. Metaphysicians will use all of these arguments to support the idea that the alternative(s) to their theory does not make sense.
Metaphysics is Hard
While these methods are helpful, they are, of course, imperfect. They depend on the assumption that our intuitions about the world are, on some level, correct. They also are vulnerable to competing intuitions. But that should not prevent people from genuinely seeking to figure out the fact of the matter in these cases. After all; though it is hard to answer, there really is a fact of the matter about whether things change, or whether God exists. The difficulty of the question should prompt more study, not less.
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I am sure that Hume’s followers will be annoyed at this, but I cannot help but point out that “abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number” and “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence” are two things noticeably absent from this passage.
I really wish we called them “metaphysicists,” but as far as I know I am the only one who feels this way.
Well said. Metaphysics is the heart and soul of philosophy.. If we understand it all the hard work is done.
Succintly laid out. You should have mentioned some modern empirical developments in metaphysics too however. For e.g the use of special relativity in debates of A theories vs B theories of time, or the terminal lucidity argument against physicalism. These are metaphysical topics which are open to being falsified or confirmed by empirical research.