Questions tagged [metaphysics]
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the essence of things, of the fundamental nature of being and the world and the principles that organize the universe. Metaphysics is supposed to answer the question "What is the nature of reality?"
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How does one know one is not dreaming?
How does one know one is not dreaming? How could one logically demonstrate to a skeptic that one is "really" there, awake and not just dreaming about the entire situation/world around him?
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Why is there something instead of nothing?
A simple but fundamental question.
The "something" means the whole Universe (known and unknown), it could be represented as the reality version of the set of all sets, which is itself debated. It ...
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What is the difference between metaphysics and ontology?
I know that ontology is a sub-field of metaphysics. But I can't see the difference between them. I mean ontology is defined as "The study of being and existence", and metaphysics is defined as "...
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Why does the universe obey scientific laws?
As far as anyone is aware, the universe consistently acts according to predictable laws (and scientific inquiry exists to determine those laws). Is there any metaphysical reason for this? Is such a ...
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Fundamental idea on proving God's existence with science
I think that proving God's existence or any deity from any culture with the rigors of science is fundamentally absurd.
The popular arguments usually involve space-time and the big bang theory. (I ...
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Why has the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley fallen out of favor in academic philosophy?
I studied George Berkeley as an undergraduate, and though I absolutely loved his work and his philosophy, many of my peers, and even some of my professors, found his philosophy wholly unappealing, ...
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Can time exist without change?
Imagine an event of one second in length, like two hands clapping. Suppose that another interval of time elapses between the clap, a period in which nothing happens in the whole universe (or in all ...
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Is it possible for something to have no cause?
Bertrand Rusell writes in his essay "Why I Am Not A Christian":
There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; [...]
Warren Rachelle, however, states in his ...
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What is the difference between naturalism and materialism?
What is the difference between naturalism and materialism, if any?
I see definitions of naturalism that say, in effect, it is the belief that there is no supernatural. But what is the supernatural ...
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What are some criticisms of Epicurus' "death is nothing to us"?
Epicurus famously asserted that death should not be feared, with roughly the following argument:
When we die, we no longer exist;
Since we no longer exist, we can feel neither pain nor pleasure. ...
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What was Cantor's philosophical reason for accepting the infinite but rejecting the infinitesimal?
I have begun inquiring recently into mathematical aspects of Georg Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers and sets, which he developed between the years of 1874 and 1897. Throughout his theory, Cantor ...
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Is there a reason to believe that our universe obeys internally consistent rules?
I'm coming at this from the POV of a physicist. Physics demonstrates that the universe does not feel any obligation to follow a humans naive idea of what makes sense. This idea of what "makes ...
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Can something come out of nothing or not? Why?
In our current state of affairs it is safe and reasonable to assume something exists - be it a universe, pure conciousness, illusion or other designations. If some readers nevertheless claim something ...
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Does True Randomness actually exist? [duplicate]
I tend to think of randomness as a lack of complete information when it comes to knowing something. If we look at the history of probability theory it centers on a lack of knowing the exact outcome of ...
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What is information?
I am fascinated with information theory, as put together by Claude Shannon in the 1940s. It is amazing to me that this concept arose from analysing letters in the alphabet and then was later ...
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Why am I this particular human being?
Some philosophers dismiss this as a question about a tautology: when Alice asks "Why am I Alice?", this is equivalent to her asking "Why is Alice Alice?", which is not an interesting question. But ...
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How can domain modeling practice benefit from metaphysical ideas?
In software development, there is an activity called domain modeling, by which the developer creates a representation of the problem domain using some language (ultimately a programming language). ...
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How do defenders of libertarian freewill reconcile it with constraints imposed by the laws of physics?
Libertarian freewill is the position that we have some measure of metaphysical freewill. Per this position, a free agent at a given point in time is able to freely select a course of action among ...
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Does compatibilism imply that a chess program has free will?
I am puzzled by compatibilism and am trying to understand what it means using a test example. Given that a typical chess program generates several choices, evaluates them with a goal of winning and ...
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Is there a parallel between Hegelian "essence" and Kantian "concept"?
I think I've found a paralelism between these two notions, at least to some extent. For Kant defines (in Logic, I, I, §1, also translated) concept as "an universal representation"
Every ...
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Why does Carnap say 'Caesar is a prime number' is meaningless?
I don't get it. Assuming there exists an individual Caesar, we can look at the set of prime numbers and not-(prime numbers), and Caesar will be in one of them.
I just don't see, even though it may be ...
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How can something non-physical exist?
One sees arguments for the existence of non-physical entities such as God, qualia, Plato's forms, objective ethical truths, etc...
But what does it mean for something non-physical to exist?
It ...
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How can the physical world be an abstract mathematical structure a la Tegmark?
This is Tegmark's short formulation of the "mathematical universe" (paraphrased by detractors as "reality made of math"), and he goes out of his way to stress that he means the "is" literally:"Whereas ...
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How to assess philosophically whether String Theory is Science or rather Metaphysics?
String theory substitutes basic particles with infinitesimal strings in order to reconcile the seemingly incompatible theories of gravity and of quantum world. But those new elements - the so called '...
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Please explain to a beginner: what is metaphysics?
As I understand it, most or all of philosophy can be put into the three main branches of philosophy: Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Axiology.
A devotee of reason, I have great affinity for, and ...
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What is the modern solution to the mind-body problem for those who still hold the mind is separate?
René Descartes gave us the problem of how the mind interacts with the body in its modern formulation. Essentially, he asked how the incorporeal mind was able to influence the material body. He also ...
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Why were Kant's categories used in the mathematical category theory?
I am curious exactly how mathematical categories were inspired by Kant's categories. The SEP article on category theory says:
In order to give a general definition of the [natural transformation], ...
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How is subjective experience of color mapped to the visible spectrum?
Kevin Warwick had a sonar sense implanted and could sense whether an object was close or far. Evidence is accumulating that our brains can make sense of "foreign" information like sonar (consider the ...
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Is "time" an abstract mental construct or does it exist independent of human consciousness?
When I consider my own existence with respect to time I can imagine three possibilities:
(1) Time extends infinitely into the past. In this case, how can the present, with me in it, exist, since ...
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Does causality always require time?
For empirical facts, it seems obvious that causality requires a time flow for the concept to make sense: A causes B implies that A happened before B.
Is it ever possible to have a causal ...
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Why should I believe my own conclusions?
Consider the metaphysical question of whether God exists (just as an example). There are, and have been throughout history, billions of atheists, billions of Christians, and billions of people with ...
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Is transubstantiation faithfully Aristotelian?
Transubstantiation is a concept that Roman Catholic scholastics, most notably Thomas Aquinas, developed for the doctrine of Communion. Catholics state that when a priest blesses the elements of bread ...
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Is the idea that "Everything is energy" even coherent?
There are many New Age websites claiming Everything is energy. Does this even make sense in philosophy of physics and metaphysics?
How can something be "made out of energy"? As far as I ...
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How much philosophy should a physicist know?
I began to read Hawking's recent book 'A Grand Design' some time ago and noticed that he savages philosophy. He says '...philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in ...
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Has modern physics undermined Berkeley's idealism?
To make a long story short, Bishop Berkeley argued that the idea of matter existing independently of perception was incoherent, since the properties of matter are (or were in Berkeley's time) defined ...
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How does Søren Kierkegaard use the word "dialectic" and how does his use of it differ from G.W.F. Hegel's?
According, to my understanding, the meaning of dialectic is...
In Plato: a back-and-forth conversational style of reasoning from his later dialogues
In the Middle Ages: the scholastic style of ...
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How does Quine answer the metaphysician's charge that scientism is self-refuting?
General scientism seems to hold that due to the predictive powers of our scientific methods, such methods are preferred to other methods of knowledge, such as metaphysics (radical scientism claiming ...
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Is the simulation hypothesis outside of science?
On the question of the simulation hypothesis (i.e. that reality is a simulation), a friend of mine once remarked he didn't accept it on the grounds of Ockham's razor. To me (with my admittedly ...
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What are the most significant responses to Lewis' "On the Plurality of Worlds"?
What are the most significant responses to David Lewis' book On the Plurality of Worlds (1986)? In particular, are there any good critical readings of Lewis' views on modal realism?
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Did Putnam prove Hume wrong about the impossiblity of grounds for ethical claims?
Hume's argument in A Treatise of Human Nature that we can't derive normative judgments from descriptive statements is well known. Recently one of my teachers said that Putnam proved Hume wrong by ...
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What is the difference between an Ordinal number and a Cardinal number?
I'm trying to understand the real difference between an Ordinal and a Cardinal, especially in relation with transfinite cardinals. The stuff on Wiki is a bit too complicated. Can anyone make it simple ...
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How many Platonic ideals are there?
Suppose you have an unripe banana that is yellow with a greenish tint. We could say that this banana partially embodies the platonic ideal of yellowness. We could also say that to a lesser degree it ...
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"→" is the symbol for material implication. Is there such a thing as "immaterial implication"?
Why do we qualify "implication" with "material"? This seems to imply that there are other kinds of implication.
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How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
This question became a symbol for the silly and pointless sophistry of medieval scholastics. But as modern scholarship has shown scholastics was not such a thoughtless desert as some of its ...
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What does Hegel mean by "Quality"?
In the Science of Logic, Hegel initially presents quality as existent determinateness. He further distinguishes two modes of determining quality in accordance with the moments of existence:
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What counters are there to Spinoza's argument that acts of free will create infinite regress?
My 16-to-21-year-old self was very preoccupied with free will. When I was 21 years old I rejected the notion as ill-defined as both my reason and my inner experience told me that my will was caused ...
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Representation versus cartography in Deleuze and Guattari?
Can someone help me contextualize and concretize the theme of representation (what they sometimes call "tracing") versus cartography ("mapping," "diagramming," even "meta-modeling", etc.) in Deleuze ...
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Resisting a classic Buddhist Argument for Mereological Nihilism
I’ve been getting into mereology and this a classic Buddhist puzzle that he recommended. How can these premises be resisted?
A. If wholes exist, then either wholes are identical with their parts or ...
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Is there a cogent argument against the principle of sufficient reason?
As far as I can see, there are no significant arguments against the principle that all events have a cause, which is to say the principle of sufficient reason. (It's important to note that the ...
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Could it be possible that the universe doesn't exist?
Could it be possible that the universe doesn't exist? That nothing exists, not even you or me?
And by not existing, I mean totally not existing, as in not even existing as a computer simulation, or a ...
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