An Overview of Metaphysics

welcome back to a little bit of philosophy this is philosophy 101 unit 3 lecture 1 an overview of metaphysics in this short video we'll define metaphysics and introduce some of the more common problems addressed in this sub-discipline of academic philosophy now this video is going to be a little bit longer than usual so hold on trust me it gets better and better the further in we get we've already discovered that by examining the etymology of the technical vocabulary and philosophy we can learn a lot about the puzzles philosophers are trying to solve metaphysics however is

a bit of an exception to the rule the term is like so many other technical words in philosophy derived from a mash-up of ancient greek words in this case the word meta and the word phusis meta is a preposition that can be translated after or about and the word fosus is adequately translated as nature so when we put them together we get about or after nature so from a purely lexicological perspective we might expect metaphysics to be a branch of philosophy that investigates the natural world perhaps metaphysics means the same thing as we mean by

science today well that wouldn't be correct there is of course a relationship between metaphysics and science as we'll see but the terms are certainly not synonymous actually the term is a somewhat accidental invention of the high middle ages you see it was during this period that the surviving works of the ancient greek philosopher aristotle were reintroduced to the west none of his published books survived the collapse of the roman empire which is an entire other story in and of itself but his journals and personal notes had been passed down through his followers and were eventually

picked up and translated into arabic probably around the 9th century of the common era some 300 years later european scholars who adapted that time had only fragments of aristotle's surviving work began translating his works from newly available texts from the islamic and byzantine empires in the east it was during this process that the word metaphysics was coined see what survived of aristotle's corpus was never meant to be published and lacked the organization and structure that one would expect from a book so it was up to the translators and editors to decipher aristotle's encyclopedic notes into

coherent texts that could then be published as individual books as they work through the manuscript they were adding titles based on the material in that particular section of the larger corpus whereas focus was on biology they called it on the parts of animals where he discussed the phenomena related to the weather they labeled it on meteorology where he discussed the nature of political systems they called it the politics and when he laid out his most unplatonic theory of psychology they titled it on the soul now there was a section of material very difficult to clearly

define let alone to fully understand which came after his material explaining motion and causation in the natural world the phusis so the editors ended up calling this section of material the metaphusis the material that follows the physics that esoteric material became crucial to saint thomas aquinas's later synthesis of aristotle and christianity and so the puzzles found in the metaphysics became a central theme in western philosophy and have stubbornly remained there ever since now today the word has two very different uses one in popular culture and the other in academic philosophy the popular usage of the

term often refers to what might better be labeled a cult or hidden knowledge covering a wide variety of topics you can find gathered in new age or popular bookstores under the heading of metaphysics but in academic philosophy the term is used to refer to what aristotle himself might have called the first principles of philosophy meaning the most fundamental questions that must be addressed if we're ever to make any serious progress in epistemology or axiology or even logic if we wanted a bumper sticker definition of metaphysics we might call it the branch of philosophy that investigates

the nature of reality not as it appears but as it actually is it includes the investigation of what is what could be but isn't but also what could not possibly be in other words metaphysics and academic philosophy is an extremely broad and unfocused field of inquiry now there's really no tidy way to organize the multiple topics and problems that fall under the heading of metaphysics so we're just going to introduce a few of the really big issues and try to get a flavor of what philosophical metaphysics is all about we'll start with the investigation of

existence itself ontology is literally attempting to give a rational explanation of what it means to be that is anta plus lagos the study of or giving a rational explanation of being we might call it the study of is-ness you see any phenomenon we observe or imagine must exist since it is a phenomenon but what does it mean to exist what is existence what is its nature hamlet had it all wrong to be or not to be isn't the question we must first know what it means to be and only then can we hope to contemplate

its contradiction everything that exists in so far as it exists has something in common existence but what is the nature of all that exists is there one kind of substance some kind of stuff that distinguishes between that which is and that which is not now applying the reductivism of the pre-socratic nature philosophers is there a single kind of stuff that is the key to existence is there one common feature of all that which is the monists believe that the answer is yes there is a single substance whatever you want to call it and it is

that one kind of stuff that marks the line between existence and non-existence we can think of these philosophers as the one stuffers out of all the diversity the division the difference that we see around us there is one unifying substance that gives them all existence but what is that stuff well on this question the monists divide into two main camps the most popular view is called materialism and the materialists argue that all there is was or ever will be is composed of matter now what exactly matter itself is is a far more difficult question which

we'll set aside for now but what it isn't is alive or complex it is neither generated nor destroyed it is that ultimate basic stuff that gives rise to complexity both organic and inorganic according to this ontological position the universe that is the set of all that is is nothing more than matter and it's absence but not all monists are materialists there are some that argue the single properly basic stuff of reality is mind whether there's a single cosmic mind or a multiplicity of individual minds is a point of contention amongst what are called ontological idealists

but they all agree that the stuff of reality is mental in nature not material now far more common is an ontological view that holds both mental and material stuff is properly basic everything that is can be reduced to one or the other of these two properly basic realities dualism is perhaps more common because it seems to align with how we think and talk about reality for example when we refer to our bodies we use the possessive this is my body as if it were an object that belongs to me if it is an object that

belongs to me then i must not be the same thing as my body hence the mind and body cannot be the same kind of thing material bodies living or not are perceivable they occupy space have mass and other relational properties that are the proper domain of physical things mental entities on the other hand are conceivable not perceivable and they're free of the physical properties and limitations associated with material bodies dualists hold that both material and ideal things co-populate the universe existing side by side sometimes even intertwined together but there's actually a third possible ontological view

claiming that there are multiple properly basic realities that combine together to form the cosmos though certainly less popular than monism or dualism in the western philosophical tradition there are some who hold that three or more properly basic kinds of stuff lie at the heart of all existence so to recap whether one thinks there is one two or a plurality of properly basic substances in the universe ontology is the branch of metaphysics that explores the nature of existence the stuff of reality the substance of being having now given the briefest of sketches of ontology and trust

me there's a lot more we can say we can move on now to another major area of focus in metaphysics what we call abstract entities since the word body or even thing often carries materialistic baggage we can instead adopt the term entity as an ontologically neutral term to refer to an existing thing when we do that we can conceptualize and talk about aspects of reality that might otherwise trap us unaware into particular ontological assumptions about the nature of reality one such entity central to philosophical analysis since at least plato is the universal we can define

a universal in somewhat poetic language as the one that stands over the many would we observe the world around us we see an astonishing diversity of things but on closer examination we begin to see patterns commonalities that allow us to organize the world what allows us to perform this mental task is the recognition of that which all the particular things share in common there are many different people but they all share one common form or essence being human human is the universal while bob is a particular human peppa the pig and henry the horse and

wally the wasp are all particular individuals but they all share in common as animals and the same can be said for all the individual hats they all share in hatness the universal is the one thing that all the particulars share in common the one that stands over the many now that we understand the difference between the universal and the particular we can think more carefully about the universals themselves what kind of a thing or entity is a universal are universals merely ideas in our mind or do they have an existence independent of minds realism is

the met is the view in metaphysics that holds that universals are mind independent that's to say their ontological status is independent of any particular thinker at any given time take numbers for example do numbers only exist when someone is thinking about them or do they exist regardless of whether they're being thought of let's imagine a time when there were no people around to think about numbers let's suppose that there are no thinkers at all at this moment in the universe the ferns are growing the brachiosaur is munching on the tops and a taurosaur is grazing

among the lower ones suddenly a predator charges into the clearing to have herself a snack how many dinosaurs are there in the scene there were two then another came in wouldn't it be true even if no one was around to think about it that there would be three dinosaurs if entities like numbers only exist in minds and there are no minds at this time then there couldn't be three dinosaurs that is of course a silly example but this is the kind of thought experiment that leads realists to claim that universals have a mind-independent ontological status

they exist regardless of whether anyone is thinking about them or not now nominalists on the other hand think that this is a bad argument and hold that universals have a mind dependent ontological status universals are ideas which are cognitions which are mind dependent how could there be thoughts without minds no minds no thoughts the debate between these two positions is of course much more complex than we've described it here but this should at least help you get started in thinking about this particular puzzle another complex abstract entity or idea is actually a pair of phenomena

that we find conjoined in the world what is the nature of identity and change for the moment let's assume that the universe is not absolutely static that change is possible now let's take this six-month-old baby as an example given the ordinary course of events and time this baby will grow up to be a boy then a young adult and finally an adult let's call him basil basil was a baby then a boy then a teen and now he's a man basil has changed he's not the baby nor is he the child nor is he the

teen he is himself but wasn't he always himself there's a sense in which basil is the same and then again there's a sense in which he's different now for now let's set aside the pesky question of his soul and concentrate instead on his body clearly his body has changed over time so 35 year old basil is clearly different from 6 month old basil but the same would be true if we compared the 10 year old to the 17 year old basil at each stage he's different and yet somehow he's also the same so what is

it that makes basil basil what is his identity and even if we consider just 35 year old basil we face the same dilemma from moment to moment his body is changing his blood is flowing cells are dying and being replaced he's moving through time and space in fact there are no two moments in which basil is exactly the same does that mean that identity is really just an illusion now if we wanted to appeal to his mind or his soul we're going to find exactly the same problem persists at each stage of basil's life his

thinking is different from moment to moment his thoughts are not identical to what they were the moment before so there are no two states of basil's mental life that are exactly the same just as we found with his body so does basil exist at all is there a thing that is basil that undergoes change or is basil just a label we place on a continuously changing set of states and what about those individual states do they even exist and if so in what way this is the problem of change and identity which metaphysics attempts to

resolve now considering the dual problem of identity and change brings us face to face with yet another deeply perplexing problem in metaphysics time and space what exactly is time a clock of course is not time but rather just a tool we use to measure it so what exactly is time in one sense we can think of time as the progression of events in the universe thinking of it in this way we can conceive of time as having a beginning but no end but we could also think of it as being infinite bidirectionally we could even

think of it being cyclical or circular but what exactly is time regardless of its direction if it's no more than the observational difference between events then it has no existence of its own only the relational property of before and after events from a particular point of view but this brings us to the corollary entity that turns out to be just as difficult to define space events are the things that exist the entities that are time and space are the distance between things that are but why should we think of time and space as entities if

they're just what lies between the things that are if they aren't events in themselves do they even exist at all and if time and space aren't things in themselves if they aren't events in the universe if they don't exist how can change in place form or time happen so perhaps time and space are things after all but if they are what are they of course various models have been put forward to try to account for what we observe as space and time but none of them are able to give us a complete understanding of what

they are in themselves this is why metaphysicians as well as cosmologists struggle to fully grasp these perplexing entities now if your brain is starting to hurt a bit don't worry that's supposed to happen you can always pause the video and come back a little bit later but if you feel up to it strap yourself in because what comes next is a real puzzler let's suppose for the sake of argument that things change let's also suppose that there is some explanation of time and space that helps make sense of the change that happens that brings us

to the relationships that exist between what came before and what comes after causation is the idea of a relationship between the entities that make up the universe now when we consider the universe well that's a lot to consider it's big really really really big and when we add up all the entities that exist not just the ones we can observe it gets even bigger the universe is the set of everything that is visible invisible material immaterial time space properties relations everything the universe is the set of everything that is it even contains all the things

that could exist but don't so let's agree that the universe is big now let's simplify things for a moment to set the stage for the next metaphysical puzzle we need to consider there are lots of different entities that exist in the universe remember an entity is just an existing thing and we've accepted as a working hypothesis that things change let's call all these things that exist and change events so when we think of the universe we can think of it as the set of all the events that are were and ever will be now the

next question we have to face is why why do events happen either there's a reason or there isn't but the fact that we can ask the question why of any event seems to imply that there is a reason there's some explanation of that event that which explains an event is what we call its cause let's make it even more simple by considering one particular event in the universe robbie the toy robot is an event in the universe let's call it event c when this event happens we want to know why it happened what is it

that caused robbie to exist what is the cause of this event now that question brings us to sharon the person who made robbie since sharon is the cause of robbie she must have existed before robbie that which precedes an event and is responsible for bringing it about is said to be the cause of the event causes precede effects but isn't sharon also an event in the universe as such we can reasonably ask why she exists and of course sharon's parents are the cause of sharon this relationship between events between cause and effect is what we

call the chain of causation sharon's parents are the cause of sharon and sharon is the cause of robbie but what if sharon's parents never met or never copulated what would happen if we remove a link in the chain if there were no cause of sharon then she wouldn't exist either and neither would robbie now we come to the big question does every event in the universe have a cause that preceded it determinism is the view that claims that each and every event in the universe is preceded by some cause or set of causes that are

responsible for bringing about that event the cause of an event might be simple or it might be complex but the determinist hypothesis is that all events have a cause or to put it negatively there are no uncaused events in the universe after all if there were an event without a cause there would be in principle no way of explaining that event there would be no reason for that a particular event to have happened it would be literally inexplicable what follows from this hypothesis is the most shocking realization of all if every event has a cause

if there are no uncaused events then every event that happens must happen exactly as it happens every event is necessary just as it is because its occurrence was preceded by a cause which itself was preceded by a cause and so on everything that happens in the universe must happen the way it happens precisely because it is part of the chain of causation there are no uncaused events to break the chain now when we consider the implications of this conclusion we discover many of our most cherished ideas about ourselves in the universe fall into serious question

i've been working on this video for you all day and it's beginning to get to me i need something to settle my mind to put me at ease i need a break i've got it what i really need is a cup of tea so i get up i go to the kitchen and i get myself a cup of tea but in doing so i suddenly realized that if determinism is correct i was always going to have been having this cup of tea i was always going to have thought that i should have had one and

i was always going to have that thought because of my befuddled moment about how to communicate to you the idea of determinism in fact all of the events in my entire life have led me to this very cup of tea and since the chain of causation is unbroken from my infancy to today the idea that i decided on my own to get up and get a cup of tea is an illusion the idea that i freely and without constraint decided to have this tea to calm my nerves is really an illusion my decision to get

a cup of tea was just part of the chain of causation that started long before i was ever born and so it is with every other decision i have or will ever make as events in the universe my decisions are part of the chain of causation that links to events that occurred in the long distance past before me before my parents my grandparents before humans before the earth or solar system were even formed beyond realizing that my life is following a pattern established long ago i also realized that my entire conception of moral and legal

responsibility is now in jeopardy the consequences of antisocial behavior of law breaking of criminal malfeasance seems inextricably tied to my ability to choose what i will and won't do but if my will is part of the cosmic chain of causation then my will is not free and how can i be held accountable for actions that i was never free not to have done in the first place this kind of problem is what motivates the alternative view of causation known as in determinism we need some events in the universe to be free from the chain of

causation at the moment of decision i need to be free from the chain to choose one action over another that's what allows me to be responsible for the actions i undertake and even more importantly to be able to wag my finger at people whose actions i disapprove of so perhaps there are some events choices for example that are uncaused events when i feel that strange urge to get up and get something to satisfy my desire to be distracted from these difficult metaphysical questions i freely choose to get up and go get a cup of tea

instead of soda or water or coffee my decision was unfettered by the great chain of causation i am fully responsible for my getting the cup of tea sure the events that occurred occurred as a procession of time but the decision itself was uncaused but as i think about this if my choice really is uncaused in what sense is it really my choice at all don't i want to be responsible for the decision wasn't the whole point to give me back my responsibility to choose or not to choose the t or to rob a bank for

that matter but if my decision is actually uncaused how can i be the cause of that decision if my choices are uncaused events in the world i'm actually no more responsible for them than i would be if they were part of the chain of causation proposed by determinism so it would seem that both views undermine our intuitive notion of personal responsibility determinism and indeterminism seem to leave my entire axiological views of responsibility in tatters perhaps i should think about something else for a while now if the problem of causation is just too troubling to continue

to consider there are plenty of other metaphysical problems for us to entertain the philosophy of mind is a major subfield of metaphysics that deals directly with the question of consciousness now i know that i'm conscious because i have direct access to my own consciousness of course i don't know if there are any other consciousnesses in the universe because i don't have access to them but since i am profoundly aware of my own just as you are of yours that's enough to say that the phenomenon exists now we can ask the philosophical question what is it

to answer this question we'll need to refer back to our earlier conversation about ontology let's take the simplest hypothesis available that ultimately there's only one kind of substance in the universe and for the sake of argument let's further suppose that that's matter now let's take the case of mary if mary is a conscious being and if we're supposing that mind is a material phenomenon then we're really talking about mary's brain mary's consciousness is really just the set of brain activities she's having at any given moment her mind her soul her consciousness is really nothing more

than the total set of activities in her brain at any given moment of course it follows from this hypothesis that if her brain dies so does her consciousness the end of the brain activity is the end of mental activity and that's that this materialistic picture leads to a rather depressing outcome so what if we assumed that the mind was not just the brain what if we adopt the duelist hypothesis that mental stuff is different from physical stuff in that case when mary dies her consciousness might seek out another body to inhabit the transmigration of the

soul in this case reincarnation would make it possible for mary's consciousness to continue but of course if this were the case then mary's consciousness wouldn't be hers anymore even more startling is the realization that if it can be in two different bodies then it could be in any body further still it could exist without any body at all this opens up a whole load of questions that beg to be addressed why if a soul can exist without a body would it ever be in any body in the first place if the mind and the brain

are made of two completely different kinds of stuff how do they interact what are the causal mechanisms of mind-brain interaction these are just a few of the perplexing questions addressed in the metaphysical sub-discipline the philosophy of mind we'll have a video later on that deals with this in more detail now to wrap up this all too brief overview of philosophical metaphysics let's introduce some problems associated with the idea of god yes we've seen the best for last human beings have spent a great deal of time thinking and talking about god throughout our entire history in

fact we've spent a good deal of time poking each other with sticks over the matter so perhaps some rational thinking about god is called for as by now you must expect such an endeavor will begin with the most basic philosophical question the what is it question if we're to make any progress getting clear on this topic we need to make sure that we're all on the same page so to avoid equivocation and ambiguity it's essential for us to establish a clear definition of the nature of divinity itself beyond being immortal what properties or qualities would

be necessary in a being worthy of the title god defining exactly what we mean by god will as we'll see in a later video be more complicated than it might at first appear however once we've got a firm grasp on the concept of divinity we can move on to the ontological question of god's existence after all it's one thing to know what god is it's another matter entirely to know that god is answering this question has given rise to arguments both deductive and inductive some will attempt to show a necessary relationship between the idea of

god and existence itself others will take a more empirical approach and attempt to infer the existence of god from the existence of other things there's even an argument for god's existence derived from our moral awareness now if we're successful and either demonstrating or inferring the existence of god to some degree we can move on to yet another vexing problem which is god's relationship to everything else it's commonly held that god is the cause of the universe but this is really only one possible view it might also be possible that god and the universe are the

same thing so that there's no causal relationship between god and everything else there's even a view that holds that the universe at least the visible part is part of god but that god's existence transcends the observable universe each of these different views proposes different answers to the problem of evil if evil is a phenomenon that exists in the universe why does it exist now these are just a few of the problems addressed in the sub-discipline of metaphysics that we call the philosophy of religion which again we'll explore more thoroughly in another video now this absurdly

brief overview of metaphysics has introduced some of the most perplexing problems that fall under the general subheading metaphysics broadly speaking can be considered an investigation into the nature of reality as opposed to how reality appears what really is what are the most basic questions of philosophy that will in turn generate questions about epistemology axiology and logic ontology is the sub-branch of metaphysics that focuses on the nature of existence itself while other topics such as time and causation fall under the generic heading of abstract entities the subfield of the philosophy of mind explores the nature of

consciousness and the philosophy of religion ill-named since it's not interested in religion at all investigates the nature of divinity the nature of god now in some upcoming videos we're going to take a deeper dive into the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of mind but for now we need to wrap things up and say farewell to this all-too-brief overview of metaphysics come back again as we continue to explore a little bit of philosophy