Higher-Order Metaphysics and Small Differences

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed: A Critical Guide, 2021

Maimonides makes extensive use of metaphysics in the Guide, but he does not discuss the discipline's nature or many of the basic issues it addresses. Instead, the Guide's readers would need to be familiar with the tradition of metaphysical inquiry that Maimonides draws on, which is that of the peripatetic philosophers. Aristotle's Metaphysics stands at its head, and Maimonides received it mediated through Greek and Arabic commentaries. Among the major Arabic commentators, Al-Farabi is known as "the second teacher," after Aristotle; the titles are accorded them by Avicenna, who credits Al-Farabi with enabling him to understand the Metaphysics. But Al-Farabi states that few understand this book since they approach it with the preconception that metaphysics and theology are equivalent: Many people have the preconceived notion that the point and purpose of this book is to discuss the Creator (may He be glorified and exalted!), the intellect, the soul, and other related topics, and that the science of metaphysics and the science of theology are one and the same thing. Consequently, we find that most people who study it are perplexed and misguided by it, since we find that most of the talk in it is devoid of any such aim.   A number of the points made here about the nature of metaphysics were explained in some detail by Alexander Altmann. Altmann's article (Altmann ) remains essential reading for anybody interested in Maimonides' understanding of metaphysics and the limits of human cognition, as well as the sources on which he drew.  "Among the sciences, there is one that looks into being inasmuch as it is and speculates on the things that belong to being essentially" (quoted in Averroes , ).

Metascience, 2013

Metaphysics of science is currently a flourishing field of philosophical research touching issues both in metaphysics and in philosophy of science. 1 From the perspective of early twentieth-century philosophy of science, this is a rather surprising development. For as is well known, logical empiricists tended to banish metaphysical questions. Thus, the issue of realism versus anti-realism (or idealism) was classified as a pseudo-problem by Rudolf Carnap in the late 1920s and Ernest Nagel some 30 years later called it a ''conflict over preferred modes of speech.'' A major step towards the rehabilitation of metaphysical questions within philosophy of science and analytical philosophy in general was the development that led to the debate about scientific realism in the 1970s. It seemed to Putnam and others that, without taking into account that scientific terms refer to real entities, philosophy of science is unable to explain how theories can be compared trans-theoretically. At the same time, metaphysical or ontological questions became respectable again in areas such as philosophy of language, which ultimately led to what is now called analytical metaphyics (see . During this period, philosophical problems that were formerly treated as pertaining exclusively the language of science were transformed into problems about metaphysical issues. Thus, for instance, theories of laws of nature in the 1950s aimed to define the characteristics of laws of nature entirely in terms of the syntactic structure of law statements. From the late 1970s on the question was what it is in the world that A. Hu ¨ttemann (&) Philosophy Seminar,

Modern Metaphysics, 2007

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between possibility and actuality. Reviewing these papers will set the scene for a REVIEW of the very popular KANTISM of Today. Metaphysics is the science of being and ask the question “What really exists?” The answer to this question has been sought for by mankind since the beginning of recorded time. In the past 2500 years there have been many answers to this question and these answers dominate our view of how physics is done. Examples of questions which were originally metaphysical are the shape of the earth, the motion of the earth, the existence of atoms, the relativity of space and time, the uncertainty principle, the renormalization of field theory and the existence of quarks and strings. we should explore our changing conception of what constitutes reality by examining the views of Aristotle, Ptolemy, St. Thomas Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Compte, Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, Schwinger, Yang, Gell-Mann, Wilson and Witten ET AL https://cds.cern.ch/record/311040/files/9609160.pdf IE IS THE INTERNATIONAL DEBT SIMPLY A FIGMENT OF ALL OUR IMAGINATION? IT MAY NEVER BE REPAID IN FULL HENCE IT MAY FOLLOW THAT IN FACT IT DOES NOT EXIST THEREFORE: ""WHY WORRY?"" Metaphysics Peter van Inwagen Meghan Sullivan SEE PDF

Analysis, 2009

Keanu anton, 2025

Allan Wolter is best known for his work on the text and translation of Blessed John Duns Scotus. But he was an accomplished thinker in his own right. This little book was published in Latin (at a time when trained Catholics were more comfortable reading and writing Latin-and when seminarians in Rome were still taught in Latin). It deserves to be better known, for it is a fine introduction to key concepts, ideas, and questions in metaphysics. The preface neatly explains Wolter's purpose and procedure in writing the book. Worth noting, though, is how remarkably ecumenical it is in its use of Scholastic and non-Scholastic materials. For while it tends to follow the Scotist position, it does not ignore, or entirely eschew, the positions of St. Thomas Aquinas or other great Scholastics, past and present, nor does it ignore, though it hardly endorses, later and non-Scholastic thinkers and theories. Distinctive of it is the way it lays out and defends in direct and pleasingly summative ways such doctrines (marginalized or opposed by others in the Scholastic tradition) as the disjunctive attributes of being, the univocity of the concept of being, multiple proofs based on the disjunctive attributes for the existence of God (running at a tangent to the famous five ways of St. Thomas), among others. The work is historically as well as metaphysically informed and informative, and may well serve as a suitable textbook in metaphysics courses, at least for those who do not wish students to know only what modern philosophers, or modern Thomists, are up to. At all events, for diversion if not also for instruction, the following translation (still in need of revision) is offered here to the indulgent reader.