Talk:Metaphysics

Wikipedia status doesn't seem to be marked

Although this is listed as 'external', I don't see any notice on the article that it's from Wikipedia. This should probably be sorted before work starts on this article. --Tom Morris 16:33, 10 August 2008 (CDT)

Origins

At least in continental circles, it is agreed that the area now known as metaphysics comes from Aristotle's text. I'd be stronger in the statement unless someone has a reasonably different etymology. However, when Aristotle the text was titled, it was not quite equivalent with the subject area...it was more of "the book after the _Physics_" than "Metaphysics." What Aristotle means by "First Philosophy" (and this is also echoed in the title of Descartes's _Meditations on First Principles_) is the concepts and such required to perceive experiential reality (and if this sounds like it is closely tied to epistemology, it's because it is). For dualist philosophers (Kant, Aristotle, Plato, etc), metaphysics deals with the part beyond experiential reality (noumenon, Categories, Forms, respectively). In some contemporary philosophers (Quentin Meillassoux as well as other Speculative Materialists), this dualism is a bit lacking and they even say that metaphysics and epistemology are the same thing (at the second conference on Speculative Realism in Bristol, England this past April, Iain Grant made this claim during his presentation). Christopher M. Roussel 18:13, 1 May 2009 (UTC)