Metaphysics Sentence Examples

Metaphysics he held to be based on psychology.

In them is foreshadowed all that he afterwards worked out in metaphysics, psychology, ethics and aesthetics.

Science, he says, may be compared to a tree; metaphysics is the root, physics is the trunk, and the three chief branches are mechanics, medicine and Ouvres, viii.

It is to her that the Principles of Philosophy were dedicated; and in her alone, according to Descartes, were united those generally separated talents for metaphysics and for mathematics which are so characteristically co-operative in the Cartesian system.

In 1705 Cartesianism was still subject to prohibitions from the authorities; but in a project of new statutes, drawn up for the faculty of arts at Paris in 1720, the Method and Meditations of Descartes were placed beside the Organon and the Metaphysics of Aristotle as text-books for philosophical study.

He entered the order of the Dominicans at the age of sixteen, and ten years later became doctor of theology at Padua, where he was subsequently professor of metaphysics.

For granting that it places the centre of reality outside the individual self it does so only at the price of reducing the reality of the latter to an appearance; 1 Institutes of Metaphysics (1854); Works (1866).

In Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), he uses " dogma " of affirmations, whether supported by reasoning or merely asserted, if they claim " metaphysical " value, metaphysics being defined as " the systematic study of the ultimate nature of reality."

In 1847-1850 he was professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Amherst; and in 1850-1854 was Washburn professor of Church history, and in 1854-1874 Roosevelt professor of systematic theology, at Union Theological Seminary.

Metaphysics, again, is concerned with the ultimate problems of matter and spirit; it endeavours to go behind the phenomena of sense and focus its attention on the fundamental truths which are the only logical bases of natural science.

After that date two more became known; the whole was familiar to John of Salisbury in 1159; while the Physics and Metaphysics came into notice about 1200.

Five years later he became professor ordinarius of logic and metaphysics; in 1759 he exchanged this for a professorship of rhetoric and poetry.

The term has also been applied to the Italian humanists of the Renaissance, and in modern times, somewhat vaguely, to thinkers who have based their speculations on the Platonic metaphysics or on Plotinus, and incorporated with it a tendency towards a mystical explanation of ultimate phenomena.

Thirdly, it can justly claim the honour of Plato's name, since it expressly goes back to him for its metaphysics, directly combating those of the Stoa.

Throughout his philosophy he endeavours to connect metaphysics with ethics and the theory of education.

He had a distinguished university career at Edinburgh, and Balliol College, Oxford, and after being fellow of Jesus and tutor of Balliol was elected professor of logic and metaphysics at St Andrews.

In the unwritten lectures of his old age, he developed this formal into a mathematical metaphysics.

Aristotle knew Plato, was present at his lectures on the Good, wrote a report of them (7rEpi Ta yaBoii), and described this latter philosophy of Plato in his Metaphysics.

The philosophy of Plato is dialogue trying to become science; that of Aristotle science retaining traces of dialectic. Secondly as regards subjectmatter, even in his early writings Aristotle tends to widen the scope of philosophic inquiry, so as not only to embrace metaphysics and politics, but also to encourage rhetoric and poetics, which Plato tended to discourage or limit.

Aristotle then even in the second period of his life, while Plato, was still alive, began to differ from him in metaphysics.

He rejected the Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first adopted his master's dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems, he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works,, which had the result of separating metaphysics from dialectic. The all-important consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle became and remained primarily a metaphysician.

On the whole then, in his early dialectical and didactic writings, of which mere fragments remain, Aristotle had already diverged from Plato, and first of all in metaphysics.

During his master's life, in the second period of his own life, he protested against the Platonic hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the one as the good, and tended to separate metaphysics from dialectic by beginning to pass from dialogues to didactic works.

After his master's death, in the third period of his own life, and during his connexion with Alexander, but before the final construction of his philosophy into a system, he was tending to write more and more in the didactic style; to separate from dialectic, not only metaphysics, but also politics, rhetoric and poetry; to admit by the side of philosophy the arts of persuasive language; to think it part of their legitimate work to rouse the passions; and in all these ways to depart from the ascetic rigidity of the philosophy of Plato, so as to prepare for the tolerant spirit of his own, and especially for his ethical doctrine that virtue consists not in suppressing but in moderating almost all human passions.

An Aristotelian work often goes on continuously at first, and then becomes disappointing by suddenly introducing discussions which break the connexion or are even inconsistent with the beginning; as in the Posterior Analytics, which, after developing a theory of demonstration from necessary principles, suddenly makes the admission, which is also the main theory of science in the Metaphysics, that demonstration is about either the necessary or the contingent, from principles either necessary or contingent, only not accidental.

Finally he died without completing some of his works, such as the Politics, and notably that work of his whole philosophic career and foundation of his whole philosophy - the Metaphysics - which, projected in his early criticism of Plato's philosophy of universal forms, gradually developed into his positive philosophy of individual substances, but remained unfinished after all.

The Metaphysics is clearly a compilation formed from essays or discourses; and it illustrates another characteristic of Aristotle's gradual method of composition.

On either alternative, however, " the first discourses " mentioned may have originally been a separate discourse; for Book F begins quite fresh with the definition of the science of being, long afterwards called " Metaphysics," and Book Z begins Aristotle's fundamental doctrine of substance.

Thus he would enter in the Metaphysics a reference to the Physics, and in the Physics a reference to the Metaphysics, precisely because both were manuscripts in his library.

How otherwise, we wonder, could one man writing alone and with so few predecessors compose the first systematic treatises on the psychology of the mental powers and on the logic of reasoning, the first natural history of animals, and the first civil history of one hundred and fifty-eight constitutions, in addition to authoritative treatises on metaphysics, biology, ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry; in all penetrating to the very essence of the subject, and, what is most wonderful, describing more facts than any other man has ever done on so many subjects ?

He left others imperfectly arranged, and some of the most important, the Metaphysics, the Politics and the logical writings.

Of the imperfect arrangement of the Metaphysics we have already spoken; and we shall speak of that of his logical writings when we come to the order of his whole system.

The incomplete state in which Aristotle left the Metaphysics, the Politics and his logical works, brings us to the hard question how much he did, and how much his Peripatetic followers did to his writings after his death.

There is nothing indeed in the Metaphysics to show whether he left it in isolated treatises or in its present disorder; and nothing in the Politics.

Perhaps something similar occurred to the Metaphysics, as Alexander imputed its redaction to Eudemus, and the majority of ancient commentators attributed its second opening (Book a) to Pasicles, nephew of Eudemus.

Although, however, we may concede that such great works as the Metaphysics, the Politics and the logical writings did not receive their present form from Aristotle himself, that concession does not deprive Aristotle of the authorship, but only of the arrangement of those works.

On the contrary, Theophrastus and Eudemus, his immediate followers, both wrote works presupposing Aristotle's Metaphysics and his logical works, and Dicaearchus, their contemporary, used his Politics for his own Tripoliticus.

The doctrine that all things are substances which are separate individuals, stated in the Categories, is expanded in the Metaphysics.

Again, according to both works, an individual substance is a subject, a universal its predicate; and they have in common the Aristotelian metaphysics, which differs greatly from the modern logic of subject and predicate.

It follows that Aristotelianism in the Categories and in the Metaphysics is a realism both of individuals and of universals; of individual substances as real subjects, and of universals as real predicates.

In brief then the common ground of the Categories and the Metaphysics is the fundamental position that all things are substances having belonging to them universals and attributes, which have no separate being as Plato falsely supposed.

This essential agreement suffices to show that the Categories and the Metaphysics are the result of one mind.

We have now to see that, in writing the Categories, on the one hand he carried his differences from his master further than he had done in his early criticisms by insisting that individual substances are not only real, but are the very things which sustain the universal; but on the other hand, he clung to further relics of the Platonic theory, and it is those which differentiate the Categories and the Metaphysics.

On the other hand, in the Metaphysics, the distinction between inherence and predication disappears; and what is more, the relation of an attribute to a substance is regarded as so close that an attribute is merely the substance modified.

The first difference then between the Categories and the Metaphysics is in the nature of an attribute; and the theory of inherence in the Categories is nearer to Plato and more rudimentary than the theory of predication in the Metaphysics.

For though both works rest on the reality of individual substances, the Categories (chap. 5) admits that universal species and genera can be called substances, whereas the Metaphysics (Z 13) denies that a universal can be a substance at all.

On the other hand, in the Metaphysics (Z 13), he distinctly denies that any universal can be a substance, on the ground that a substance is a subject, whereas a universal is a predicate and a belonging of a subject, from which it follows as he says that no universal is a substance, and no substance universal.

What conclusion are we to draw from these differences between the Categories and the Metaphysics?

The only logical conclusion is that the Categories, being nearer to Plato on the nature of attributes, and still nearer on the relation of universals to substances, is earlier than the Metaphysics.

As the Platonic philosophy was primarily moral, and its metaphysics a theory of the moral order of the universe, Aristotle from the first must have mastered the Platonic ethics.

In the Metaphysics (A 7, 1072 b 16), in discussing the occupation of God, he says " his pleasure is activity," or " his activity is pleasure," according to a difference of readings which makes no difference to the identification of pleasure and activity (b pyELa).

As then we find this identification of pleasure with activity in the Metaphysics and in the De Anima, as well as in the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia, the only logical conclusion, from which there is no escape, is that, so far as the treatment of pleasure goes, any Aristotelian treatise which defines it as activity is genuine.

It is more likely that Aristotle identified pleasure with activity in the De Anima, the Metaphysics and the three moral treatises, as we have seen; but that afterwards some subsequent Peripatetic, considering that the pleasure of perceiving or thinking is not the same as perceiving or thinking, declared the previous identification of pleasure with activity absurd.

Aristotle then wrote three moral treatises, which agree in the fundamental doctrines that happiness requires external fortune, but is activity of soul according to virtue, rising from morality through prudence to wisdom, or that science of the divine which constitutes the theology of his Metaphysics.

But at any rate the process was gradual; and Aristotle was advanced in metaphysics, mathematics, physics, dialectics, rhetoric and poetics, before he became the founder of logic.

But Zeller does not give enough weight either to the evidence of early composition contained in the Politics and Meteorology, or to the evidence of subsequent contemporaneous composition contained in the cross-references, e.g between the Physics and the Metaphysics.

Zeller tries to get over this difficulty of cross-reference by detaching Metaphysics, Book A, from the rest and placing it before the Physics.

The truth is that the Metaphysics both precedes and follows the Physics, because it had been all along occupying Aristotle ever since he began to differ from Plato's metaphysical views and indeed forms a kind of presupposed basis of his whole system.

Plato and Speusippus in the Ethics, Eudoxus and Callippus in the Metaphysics, he was writing these passages after the deaths of these persons; but he might have been also writing the Ethics and the Metaphysics both beforehand and afterwards.

It gives too much weight to Aristotle's logic, and too little to his metaphysics, on account of two prejudices of the commentators which led them to place both logic and physics before metaphysics.

Aristotle rightly used all the sciences of his day, and especially his own physics, as a basis of his metaphysics.

On the other hand, Aristotle entitles the science of all being " Primary Philosophy " (irpcori OeXoaoOla), and the science of physical being " Secondary Philosophy " (SEUTEpa 49eXoa041a), which suggests that his order is from Metaphysics to Physics, the reverse of his editor's order from Physics to Metaphysics.

With some more show of authority it puts Logic before Metaphysics.

He means that the logical analysis of demonstration in the Analytics would teach them beforehand that there cannot be demonstration, though there must be induction, of an axiom, or any other principle; whereas, if they are not logically prepared for metaphysics, they will expect a demonstration of the axiom, as Heraclitus, the Heraclitean Cratylus and the Sophist Protagoras actually did, - and in vain.

It is, however, not the real order for studying the philosophy of Aristotle, because there is more Metaphysics in his Physics than Physics in his Metaphysics, and more Metaphysics in his Logic than Logic in his Metaphysics.

The reason is that Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician half for and half against Plato, occupied himself with metaphysics all his philosophical life, made the science of things the universal basis of all sciences without destroying their independence, and so gradually brought round philosophy from universal forms to individual substances.

The traditional order of the Aristotelian writings, still continued in the Berlin edition, beginning with the logical writings on page 1, proceeding to the physical writings on page 184, and postponing the Metaphysics to page 980, is not the real order of Aristotle's philosophy.

Moreover, he compared dialectic and sophistry, on account of their generality, with primary philosophy in the Metaphysics (P 2, 1004 b 17-26); to the effect that all three concern themselves with all things, but that about everything metaphysics is scientific, dialectic tentative, sophistry apparent, not real.

Aristotle at once maintains the primacy of metaphysics and vindicates the independence of the special sciences.

Such is the great mind of Aristotle manifested in the large map of learning, by which we have now to determine the order of his extant philosophical writings, with a view to studying them in their real order, which is neither chronological nor traditional, but philosophical and scientific. Turning over the pages of the Berlin edition, but passing over works which are perhaps spurious, we should put first and foremost speculative philosophy, and therein the primary philosophy of his Metaphysics (980 a 211093 b 29); then the secondary philosophy of his Physics, followed by his other physical works, general and biological, including among the latter the Historia Animalium as preparatory to the De Partibus Animalium, and the De Anima and Parva Naturalia, which he called " physical " but we call " psychological" (184 a 10-967 b 27); next, the practical philosophy of the Ethics, including the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia as earlier and the Nicomachean Ethics as later (1094-124 9 b 25), and of the Politics (1252-1342), with the addition of the newly discovered Athenian Constitution as ancillary to it; finally, the productive science, or art, of the Rhetoric, including the earlier Rhetoric to Alexander and the later Rhetorical Art, and of the Poetics, which was unfinished (1354-end).

Aristotle, who made this great discovery, must have had great difficulty in developing the new investigation of reasoning processes out of dialectic, rhetoric, poetics, grammar, metaphysics, mathematics, physics and ethics; and in disengaging it from other kinds of learning.

Here we have only room for its spirit, which we shall try to give as if he were himself speaking to us, as head of the Peripatetic school at Athens, and holding no longer the early views of his dialogues, or the immature views of such treatises as the Categories, but only his mature views, such as he expresses in the Metaphysics.

Such is Aristotle's realism of individuals and universals, contained in his primary philosophy, as expressed in the Metaphysics, especially in Book Z, his authoritative pronouncement on being and substance.

Above all natural substances, the objects of natural science, there stands a supernatural substance, the object of metaphysics as theology.

Such is Aristotle's theological realism without materialism and the origin of all spiritualistic realism, contained in his Metaphysics (A 6-end).

Consequently, the universal essence of a species of substances is not one and the same eternal essence in all the individuals of a species but only similar, and is not substance as Aristotle calls it in the Metaphysics, inconsistently with his own doctrine of substance, but is a whole number of similar substances, e.g.

In France there are the works of Cousin (1835), Felix Ravaisson, who wrote on the Metaphysics (1837-1846), and Barthelemy St Hilaire, who translated the Organon and other works (1844 seq.).

Ross has translated the Metaphysics.

In 1744 was published the Siris, partly occasioned by the controversy as to the efficacy of tar-water in cases of small-pox, but rising far above the circumstance from which it took its rise, and revealing hidden depths in the Berkeleian metaphysics.

Instead, therefore, of fate or necessity, or matter, or the unknown, a living, active mind is looked upon as the centre and spring of the universe, and this is the essence of the Berkeleian metaphysics.

He once for all lifted the problem of metaphysics to a higher level, and, in conjunction with his successor, Hume, determined the form into which later metaphysical questions have been thrown.

We must look for ethics to supply the corner-stone of metaphysics, and psychology is a necessary propaedeutic. The System der Philosophie (1899; 3rd ed., 1907) contained the results of Wundt's work up to that date, both in the domain of science and in the more strictly philosophic field.

The misapprehension of the significance of µera led to various mistaken uses of the term " metaphysics," e.g.

The extent to which these two attitudes have been combined or separated is discussed in the ensuing article which deals with the various schools of modern metaphysics in relation to the principles of the Aristotelian " first philosophy."

Not long ago, in England at all events, metaphysics was merged in psychology.

Aristotle, the founder of metaphysics as a distinct science, was also the founder of metaphysical realism, and still remains its main authority.

So far true metaphysics is a monism of substance, in the sense that all things are substances and that all substances, however different, are members of one substance, the whole universe of body and spirit.

In this case metaphysics generally will have to recognize three monisms, a materialistic monism of body, an idealistic monism of soul, and a realistic monism of substance, which is also a dualism of substances.

Comte tells us that man first gets over theology, then over metaphysics, and finally rests in positivism.

Yet in getting over theology he ceases to believe in God, and in getting over metaphysics he ceases to believe in soul.

As Paul Janet truly remarked, positivism contains an unconscious metaphysics in rejecting final causes and an immaterial soul.

Now, when in surrendering theology and metaphysics we have also to surrender God and the soul, we are not free from materialism.

His First Principles, his book on metaphysics, is founded on this same point, that what we know is phenomena produced by an unknown noumenal power.

If so, materialism is not the whole truth of metaphysics.

We cannot, therefore, agree with many recent idealists who regard Leibnitz as one of themselves, though it is true that, when stripped of its realism, his metaphysics easily passed into the metaphysical idealisms of Lotze and of Fechner.

The fourth position is the coping-stone of Kant's metaphysics.

His theory of the nature of will was his own, and arrived at from a voluntaristic psychology leading to a voluntaristic metaphysics of his own.

In short, his metaphysics was founded on a misnomer, and simply consisted in calling unconscious force by the name of unconscious will (Unbewusster Wille).

Finally, Schopenhauer's voluntarism has had a profound effect on psychology inside and outside Germany, and to a less degree produced attempts to deduce from voluntaristic psychology new systems of voluntaristic metaphysics, such as those of Paulsen and Wundt.

On these foundations he builds the details of his idealistic metaphysics.

He believed in reciprocal action; and the very essence of his metaphysics consists in sublimating the interaction of bodies into the interaction of immaterial elements, which produce effects on one another and on the soul as one of them.

Lotze's metaphysics is thus distinguished from the theism of Newton and Leibnitz by its pantheism, and from the pantheism of Spinoza by its idealism.

Then in 1855 he published his Atomenlehre, partly founded on his physics, but mainly on his metaphysics.

But, in thus adapting to his own purposes the Leibnitzian analysis of material into immaterial, he drew his own conclusions according to his own metaphysics, which required that the supposed centres of force are not Leibnitzian " monads," nor Herbartian " reals," nor divine modifications such as Lotze afterwards supposed, but are elements of a system which in outer aspect is bodily and in inner aspect is spiritual, and obeying laws of spirit.

Thus his metaphysics is Leibnitzian, like that of Lotze, and yet is opposed to the most characteristic feature of monadology - the percipient indivisible monad.

In 1860 appeared Fechner's Elemente der Psychophysik, a work which deeply affected subsequent psychology, and almost revolutionized metaphysics of body and soul, and of physical and psychical relations generally.

It becomes necessary, therefore, to determine how far Fechner derived his psychophysics from experience, how far from fallacies of inference, from his romantic imagination and from his theosophic metaphysics, which indeed coloured his whole book on psychophysics.

But, unfortunately for Fechner, the very opposite conclusion followed from the presuppositions of his parallelistic metaphysics, and from the Leibnitzian view of the conservation of energy, which he was the first in our time to use in order to argue that a physical cause cannot produce a psychical effect, on the ground that physical energy must be exactly replaced by physical energy.

The second question he answered from his parallelistic metaphysics by deducing that even within the organism there is only a constant dependency of sensation on nervous process without causation, because the nervous process is physical but the sensation psychical.

Fechner first confused physics and metaphysics in psychophysics, and next proceeded to confuse them again in his work on evolution (Einige Ideen zur SchOpfungs and Entwicklungs-geschichte der Organismen, 1873).

We have dwelt on this curious metaphysics of Fechner because it contains the master-key to the philosophy of the present moment.

The originality of Paulsen consists in trying to supply an epistemological ecplanation of the metaphysics of Fechner, by reconciling him with Kant and Schopenhauer.

All these systems of metaphysics, differ as they may, agree that things are known to exist beyond sensible phenomena, but yet are mental realities of some kind.

Phenomenal Idealism In Germany Phenomenal idealism is the metaphysics which deduces that, as we begin by perceiving nothing but mental phenomena of sense, so all we know at last from these data is also phenomena of sense, actual or possible.

For what does it matter to metaphysics whether by association sensations suggest ideas, and so give rise to ideas of substance and causation a posteriori, or synthetic unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori notions of substance and causation into objects which are merely mental phenomena of experience, when it is at once allowed by the followers of Hume and Kant alike that reason in any logical use has no power of inferring things beyond the experience of the reasoner?

No real advance in metaphysics can take place, and natural science itself is in some danger, until the true history of the evidences of the laws of mechanical force is restored; and then it will soon appear that in the force of collision what we know is not material points determining one another's opposite accelerations, but bodies by force of impenetrable pressure causing one another to keep apart.

Thirdly, on the grounds that logical thinking adds the notion of substance, as substrate, to experience of the physical, but not of the psychical, and that the most proper being of mind is will, he concludes that wills are not active substances, but substance-generating activities (" nicht thatige Substanzen sondern substanzerzeugende Thdtigkeiten," System, 429) What kind of metaphysics, then, follows from this compound of psychology and epistemology?

Thi is Wundt's view, but only in the sense that reason passes from ideas to `'ideals," whether in the special sciences or in metaphysics.

He supposes in metaphysics the same transcendence in forming cosmological, psychological, and ontological " ideals."

Wundt, starting from a psychology of unitary experience, deduces a consistent metaphysics of no inference of things transcending experience throughout - or rather until he came to the very last sentence of his System der Philosophie (1889), where he suddenly passes from a necessity of " ideals " (Ideen), to a necessity of " faith " (Glauben), without " knowledge " (Wissen).

To understand Wundt is to discover what a mess modern psychology has made to metaphysics.

Both proceeded to take Hegelianism seriously, and between them spread a kind of Hegelian orthodoxy in metaphysics and in theology throughout Great Britain.

Fichte's " Wissenschaftslehre," he said, is a completely untenable system, and a metaphysics of fruitless apices, in which he disclaimed any participation; his own Kritik he refused to regard as a propaedeutic to be construed by the Fichtian or any other standpoint, declaring that it is to be understood according to the letter; and he went so far as to assert that his own critical philosophy is so satisfactory to the reason, theoretical and practical, as to be incapable of improvement, and for all future ages indispensable for the highest ends of humanity.

His aim is to remedy this defect by psychology, under the conviction that a true metaphysics is at bottom psychology, and a true psychology fundamentally metaphysics.

But in his metaphysics founded thereon he interprets the outside object to mean an object outside you and me, but not self-subsistent; not outside universal reason, but only " Bent reason."

Laurie's metaphysics is an attempt to supply a psychological propaedeutic to Hegelian metaphysics.

He is unconsciously returning to the metaphysics of Aristotle in spirit; yet he differs from toto coelo in the letter.

So far he reminds one of Herbart, who founded his " realistic " metaphysics on similar misunderstandings; except that, while Herbart concluded that the world consists of a number of simple " reals," each with a simple quality but unknown, Bradley concludes that reality is one absolute experience which harmonizes the supposed contradictions in an unknown manner.

But his metaphysics is an interesting example of a phenomenalist, sympathizing with noumenalists so different as Hegel and Fechner, and yet maintaining his phenomenalism.

English moral philosophy cannot long tolerate a metaphysics which by merging all minds in one would destroy personality, personal causation and moral responsibility, as James Martineau well said.

Mansel and Jowett, Green and Caird, Bradley and Bosanquet arose in quick succession, the predecessors of a generation which aims at a new metaphysics.

Again, the method of true realism is that of Aristotle, and consists in recognizing the independence of metaphysics.

The contrary method is psychological metaphysics, which makes metaphysics dependent on psychology, on the ground that the origin of knowledge determines its limits.

Hence, to proceed from psychology to metaphysics is to proceed from the less to the more known; and the paradoxes of psychological have caused those of metaphysical idealism.

The realist, then, ought to begin with metaphysics without psychological prejudices.

With the conviction that the only fair way of describing metaphysics has been to avoid putting forward one system, and even to pay most attention to the dominant idealism, we have nevertheless been driven occasionally to test opinions by this independent metaphysical method.

At the same time, while the independence of metaphysics leads us to metaphysical realism, this is not to deny the value of psychology, still less of logic. Besides the duty of determining what we know, there is the duty of determining how we know it.

But in order to discharge it, a reform of psychology as well as of metaphysics is required.

The psychological metaphysics of Cousin and of Janet was, however, too flimsy a realism to withstand its passage into this very idealism of matter which has become the dominant French metaphysics.

These examples are enough to show that the psychological metaphysics of spiritual realism has not been able to withstand the rise and progress of spiritual idealism in France.

It also contained much that was doubtful, and much that was ill-adapted to the metaphysics of realism.

Yet they thought it the only avenue to metaphysics.

From the Roman Catholic point of view this reaction to " Thomism " was a timely protest against modern metaphysics.

One cannot but feel regret at seeing the Reformed Churches blown about by every wind of doctrine, and catching at straws now from Kant, now from Hegel, and now from Lotze, or at home from Green, Caird, Martineau, Balfour and Ward in succession, without ever having considered the basis of their faith; while the Roman Catholics are making every effort to ground a Universal Church on a sane system of metaphysics.

However this may be, the power of the movement is visible enough from the spread of Thomism over the civilized world, and in England from the difference between the freer treatment of metaphysics by some Roman Catholic writers and that which has arisen under the immediate influence of Thomism.

Clarke, include General Metaphysics (1890), by John Rickaby, who effectively criticizes Hegel by precise distinctions, which, though scholastic, did not deserve to be forgotten.

It is evident that a philosophy containing so many questionable opinions is not fit to be made into an authoritative orthodoxy in metaphysics.

The Thomism, therefore, of our day is wrong, from a metaphysical point of view, so far as it elevates Aristotelianism, as seriously modified but not fundamentally corrected by Aquinas, into an authoritative orthodoxy in metaphysics.

What, then, is the future of metaphysics?

The independence of metaphysics as the science of being, the principles of contradiction and excluded middle with their qualifications, the distinction without separation between substance and attributes, the definition of substance as a distinct individual thing, the discovery that the world consists of substances existing apart but related to one another, the distinction between material and efficient causes or matter and force, the recognition both of the natural and of the supernatural - all these and many other half-forgotten truths are the reasons why we must always begin with the study of Aristotle's Metaphysics.

One of Price's most intimate friends was Dr Priestley, in spite of the fact that they took the most opposite views on morals and metaphysics.

Other commentaries on the Topics and the first six books of the Metaphysics still exist in manuscript.

Among his principal contributions to this work were articles on "Instinct," "Theology" and "Metaphysics."

He accordingly set himself to studying various branches of literature, specially metaphysics and moral philosophy.

But the subjects dealt with concern more or less all the great problems of thought on what may be called the theological side of metaphysics - the sufficiency of reason, the trustworthiness of experience, the admissibility of revelation, free will, foreknowledge, and the rest.

In this aversion to a purely or mainly intellectual training may be traced a recoil from the systematic metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, whose tendency was to subordinate the practical man to the philosopher.

Ethics had been based upon logic and metaphysics.

A summary of his philosophy is contained in his article "Metaphysics" in the 8th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (separately published, 1860).

In proportion as the Christian Church had to go deeper into metaphysics in the formulation of its belief as to God, as to Christ, as to the soul, the Greek philosophical terminology, which was the only vehicle then available for precise thought, had to become more and more an essential part of Christianity.

In this direction pragmatism may ultimately lead to a number of metaphysics, each of which will represent a personal guess at a final synthesis of experience, while remaining essentially undogmatic and improvable.

In his Antient Metaphysics (1 779- 1 799), Monboddo conceived man as gradually elevating himself from an animal condition, in which his mind is immersed in matter, to a state in which mind acts independently of body.

He edited the North British Review from 1850 to 1857, and in 1856, having previously been a Free Church minister, he succeeded Sir William Hamilton as professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University.

In 1836 Sir William Hamilton was appointed to the chair of Logic and Metaphysics, and Fraser became his pupil.

Besides being a chancery lawyer, he was more particularly a philosopher, conspicuous for his knowledge of Hegelian metaphysics.

The nature of axiomatic certainty is part of the fundamental problem of logic and metaphysics.

In a MS. of 102 quarto sheets, of which the first three and the seventh are wanting, there is preserved the original sketch of the Hegelian system, so far as the logic and metaphysics and part of the philosophy of nature are concerned.

Hegel's lectures, in the winter of 1801-1802, on logic and metaphysics were attended by about eleven students.

The first two divisions - the " objective logic " - are what is usually called metaphysics.

This has taken the direction on the one hand of a revival of realism (see Metaphysics), on the other of a new form of subjective idealism (see Pragmatism).

The great commentaries exist only for the Posterior Analytics, Physics, De Caelo, De Anima and Metaphysics.

From 1801 to 1804 he was professor of philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, after which he succeeded Kant in the chair of logic and metaphysics at the university of Konigsberg.

As psychology recognizes a distinction of pleasure and pain, and metaphysics of good and evil, so morality assumes the difference between right and wrong in action, good and bad in character; but the distinction in psychology and metaphysics applies to what is, the difference in morality is based on a judgment of what is by what ought to be.

He spent all his spare time in the study of classics, history, metaphysics and political economy, and in learning German, French and Italian.

The Schoolmen, however, gradually came to realize that the result to their logic was to make it a sermocionalis scientia, and to their metaphysics the danger of nominalism.

But it is most closely related to the sciences of metaphysics and psychology, which form with it a triad of sciences.

Metaphysics is the science of being in general, and therefore of the things which become objects apprehended by our minds.

The real point is their interdependence, which is so intimate that one sign of great philosophy is a consistent metaphysics, psychology and logic. If the world of things is known to be partly material and partly mental, then the mind must have powers of sense and inference enabling it to know these things, and there must be processes of inference carrying us from and beyond the sensible to the insensible world of matter and mind.

Hegel, having identified being with thought, merged metaphysics in logic. But he divided logic into objective and subjective, and thus practically confessed that there is one science of the objects and another of the pro cesses of thought.

It does not, with the former, regard logic as purely formal in the sense of abstracting thought from being, nor does it follow the latter in amalgamating metaphysics with logic by identifying being with thought.

The basis of Bradley's logic is the fallacious dialectic of Hegel's metaphysics, founded on the supposition that two things, which are different, but have something in common, are the same.

Logic cannot, it is true, decide what these things are, nor what the senses know about them, without appealing to metaphysics and psychology.

The Sophistes is apparently matter for animadversion by Aristotle in the Metaphysics and elsewhere, but derives stronger support from the testimonies to the Politicus which presumes it.

There is no committal to the metaphysics in the light of which the logical inquiry is at last to find its complete justification.

Metaphysics and speculative theories were valueless for Paul; he was conscious of a mighty power transforming his own life and filling him with joy, and that this power was identical with Jesus of Nazareth he knew.

Man's place is not even central, as he appears a temporary inhabitant of a minor planet in one of the lesser stellar systems. Every science is involved, and theology has come into conflict with metaphysics, logic, astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, zoology, biology, history and even economics and medicine.

In science the process has been reversed; nature ascends, so to speak, into the region of the supernatural and subdues it to itself; the marvellous or miraculous is brought under the domain of natural law, the canons of physics extend over metaphysics, and religion takes its place as one element in the natural relationship of man to his environment.

He thought that the source of all things was moisture and is by Aristotle coupled with Thales (Metaphysics, A 3).

In philosophy, properly so called, the humanistic scorn for medieval dullness and obscurity swept away theological metaphysics as valueless.

One mass of Greek and Roman erudition, including history and metaphysics, law and science, civic institutions and the art of war, mythology and magistracies, metrical systems and oratory, agriculture and astronomy, domestic manners and religious rites, grammar and philology, biography and numismatics, formed the miscellaneous subject-matter of this so-styled rhetoric. Notes taken at these lectures supplied young scholars with hints for further exploration; and a certain tradition of treating antique authors for the display of general learning, as well as for the elucidation of their texts, came into vogue, which has determined the method of scholarship for the last three centuries in Europe.

In theology the appearance of dualism is sporadic and has not the fundamental, determining importance which it has in metaphysics.

Herein he identified metaphysics and ethics, combining the good with the truly existent and evil with the non-existent.

In metaphysics, accidentalism denies the doctrine that everything occurs or results from a definite cause.

Speculative or theoretical natural philosophy has to deal with natural substances and qualities and is subdivided into physics and metaphysics.

Following this summary philosophy come the sciences proper, rising like a pyramid in successive stages, the lowest floor being occupied by natural history or experience, the second by physics, the third, which is next the peak of unity, by metaphysics.

The first kind of investigation rises little above mere natural history; but the other is more important and paves the way for metaphysics.

Into questions of metaphysics, as commonly understood, Bacon can hardly be said to have entered, but a long line of thinkers have drawn inspiration from him, and it is not without justice that he has been looked upon as the originator and guiding spirit of what is known as the empirical school.

The longest of these new chapters deal with the primacy of the will, with death and with the metaphysics of sexual love.

It is a great mistake to suppose that because he took no great part in politics he had no interest in the practical questions of his time, or that he was so immersed in metaphysics as to live in the clouds.

His intellect was profound and comprehensive, thoroughly qualified to grapple with the deepest problems of metaphysics, but by natural preference occupying itself mainly with the practical and moral.

In metaphysics and in natural history Aristotle was a law to him, and in medicine Galen, but he was not a slave to the text or the details of either.

Yet Leibnitz and Sir William Hamilton recognize him as the best modern exponent of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle.

The physical basis of the system remained unchanged but neglected; all creative force or even original research in the departments of physics and metaphysics vanished.

This was followed in 1824 by a German translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics.

Beginning with metaphysics and ethics and passing on to mathematics, he turned to chemistry at the end of 17 9 7, and within a few months of reading Nicholson's and Lavoisier's treatises on that science had produced a new theory of light and heat.

This conception of the self belongs mainly to metaphysics and involves the whole problem of the relation between subject and object, the nature of reality, and the possibility of knowledge of self and of object.

The relation of the self to the not-self need not to be treated here (see Metaphysics).

His best-known extant work is a commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle.

In the middle of the century two men sought to incorporate in their philosophy the physical basis which Hegel had ignored in his spiritism - recognizing that life is conditioned by an environment and not an abstraction for metaphysics.

Linnaeus's primarily zoological classification of man did not, however, suit the philosophical opinion of the time, which responded more readily to the systems represented by Buffon, and later by Cuvier, in which the human mind and soul formed an impassable wall of partition between him and other mammalia, so that the definition of man's position in the animal world was treated as not belonging to zoology, but to metaphysics and theology.

Besides his translations of Aristotle's Metaphysics and Xenophon's Memorabilia, his most important work is a treatise directed against George of Trebizond, a violent Aristotelian, entitled In Calumniatorem Platonis.

To the odd terminology of Donne's poetic philosophy Dryden gave the name of "metaphysics," and Johnson, borrowing the suggestion, invented the title of the "metaphysical school" to describe, not Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical poets who succeeded him, and who employed a similarly fantastic language, and who affected odd figurative inversions.

Logic, ethics and physics, psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics are all fused together by Plato in a semi-religious synthesis.

For this investigation Aristotle's most usual name is "first philosophy" or, as a modern might say, "first principles"; but there has since been appropriated to it, apparently by accident, the title "metaphysics."

This inquiry which was long called "rational cosmology," may be said to form part of the general subject of metaphysics, or at all events a pendant to it.

By the gradual sifting out of the special sciences philosophy thus came to embrace primarily the inquiries grouped as "metaphysics" or "first philosophy."

Subsidiary to metaphysics, as the central inquiry, stand the sciences of logic and ethics, to which may be added aesthetics, constituting three normative sciences - sciences, that is, which do not, primarily, describe facts, but rather prescribe ends or set forth ideals.

It is evident, however, that if logic deals with conceptions which may be considered constitutive of knowledge as such, and if ethics deals with the harmonious realization of human life, which is the highest known form of existence, both sciences must have a great deal of weight in the settling of the general question of metaphysics.

It has frequently tended, however, and still tends, to be used as specially convertible with the narrower term "metaphysics."

It will not be easy to infuse into so abstract and bloodless a term as "metaphysics" the fuller life (and especially the inclusion of ethical considerations) suggested by the more concrete term "philosophy."

Philosophy, even under its most discredited name of metaphysics, has no other subjectmatter than the nature of the real world, as that world lies around us in everyday life, and lies open to observers on every side.

Hamilton encouraging the confusion by speaking of "psychology or metaphysics," 1 while his lectures on metaphysics are mainly taken up with what belongs in the strictest sense to psychology proper, with an occasional excursus (as in the theory of perception) into epistemology.

But he continues to use the terms "philosophy," "metaphysics," and "mental science" as synonymous.

This introduces us to the second part of the question we are seeking to determine, namely the relation of epistemology to metaphysics.

If self-consciousness be treated in this objective fashion, then we pass naturally from epistemology to metaphysics or ontology.

The result of the foregoing, however, is to show that, as soon as epistemology draws its conclusion, it becomes metaphysics; the theory of knowledge passes into a theory of being.

If the theory of knowledge thus passes insensibly into metaphysics it becomes somewhat difficult to assign a distinct sphere to logic (q.v.).

The question of aesthetics would then be formulated - What is it in things that makes them beautiful, and what is the relation of this aspect of the universe to its ultimate nature, as that is expounded in metaphysics?

The connexion of ethics with metaphysics will be patent as a matter of fact, if it be remembered how Plato's philosophy is summed up in the idea of the good, and how Aristotle also employs the essentially ethical notion of end as the ultimate category by which the universe may be explained or reduced to unity.

But there is no warrant for restricting the term to any special mode of approaching the problems indicated; and as these form the central subject of metaphysical inquiry, no valid distinction can be drawn between natural theology and general metaphysics.

But those who, like the positivists, agnostics and sceptics, deny the possibility of metaphysics as a theory of the ultimate nature of things, are still obliged to retain philosophy as a theory of knowledge, in order to justify the asserted limitation or impotence of human reason.

Ideal metaphysics, though they fail of the inner truth of things, have a value as the embodiment of high aspirations, in the same way as poetry and religion.

In his writings, which were numerous, he seems to have covered nearly the whole of the Academic programme; but metaphysics and ethics were the subjects which principally engaged his thoughts.

In thus reverting to the crudities of certain Pythagoreans, he laid himself open to the criticisms of Aristotle, who, in his Metaphysics, recognizing amongst contemporary Platonists three principal groups - (1) those who, like Plato, distinguished mathematical and ideal numbers; (2) those who, like Xenocrates, identified them; and (3) those who, like Speusippus, postulated mathematical numbers only - has much to say against the Xenocratean interpretation of the theory, and in particular points out that, if the ideas are numbers made up of arithmetical units, they not only cease to be principles, but also become subject to arithmetical operations.

His reputation soon widened, and in 1754 he became professor of logic, metaphysics and Greek in the university of Reggio, and in 1760 was translated to Modena, where he continued to teach with great assiduity and success, but devoted his whole leisure to natural science.

This is the basis and the only proper basis of ontology or metaphysics - the science of being - and of the philosophy of history.

The intellectual intuition of Schelling, as above consciousness, the pure being of Hegel, as an empty abstraction, unvindicated, illegitimately assumed, and arbitrarily developed, are equally useless as bases of metaphysics.

Cousin made no reply to Hamilton's criticism beyond alleging that Hamilton's doctrine necessarily restricted human knowledge and certainty to psychology and logic, and destroyed metaphysics by introducing nescience and uncertainty into its highest sphere - theodicy.

Maha-vira treated ethics as corollary and subordinate to his metaphysics, with which he was chiefly concerned."

He further denies that Aristotle identified his First Philosophy with a " theology," holding the text of the Metaphysics to be out of order and 1 Philosophische Monatshefte (1888), Heft 1 and 2.

As such it is used specially in (1) theology and metaphysics, (2) mathematics.

This way of solving, or passing over, the ultimate problems of thought has had many followers in cultured circles imbued with the new physical science of the day, and with disgust for the dogmatic creeds of contemporary orthodoxy; and its outspoken and even aggressive vindication by physicists of the eminence of Huxley had a potent influence upon the attitude taken towards metaphysics, and upon the form which subsequent Christian apologetics adopted.

They involve an elaborate discussion, not only of Christian evidences, but of the entire subject-matter alike of Ethics and Metaphysics, of Philosophy as a whole, and of the philosophies of individual writers who have dealt in their different ways with the problems of existence and epistemology.

Another work on what has sometimes been termed the metaphysics of language appeared from his pen in 1828, under the title of Ober den Dualis; but the great work of his life, on the ancient Kawi language of Java, was unfortunately interrupted by his death on the 8th of April 183 5.

He has not bequeathed an imposing system, hardly even a striking discovery in metaphysics, but he is a signal example in the Anglo-Saxon world of the love of attainable truth for the sake of truth and goodness.

But the historical origin of the questions at issue is to be sought rather in theology than in metaphysics, while the discovery made from time to time by men of science of the inapplicability of natural laws or modes of operation (which they have been accustomed to regard as of universal range and necessity) to the facts or assumed facts of human activity, is a constant source of fresh discussions of the problem.

Reference should be made either to the individual philosophers themselves or to articles on metaphysics or on ethics.

In logic and metaphysics it investigates either the process of apprehension itself, or conceptions such as cause, substance, space, time, which the ordinary scientific consciousness never criticizes.

So again, in his last great ethico-political treatise (the Laws) there is hardly a trace of his peculiar metaphysics.

In Fichte's system the connexion of ethics and metaphysics is still more intimate; indeed, we may compare it in this respect to Platonism; as Plato blends the most fundamental notions of each of these studies in the one idea of good, so Fichte blends them in the one idea free-will.

The other great movement in modern moral philosophy due to the influence of German, and especially Hegelian, idealism followed naturally for the most part from the revival of interest in metaphysics noticeable in the latter half of the 10th century.

Nothing could be farther from Green's teaching than the belief that constructive metaphysics could, unaided by the intuitions of the moral consciousness, discover laws for the regulation of conduct.

But although Green's loyalty to the primary facts of the moral consciousness prevented him from constructing a rationalistic system of morals based solely upon the conclusions of metaphysics, it was perhaps inevitable that the revival of interest in metaphysics so prominent in his own speculations should lead to a more daring criticism of ethical first principles in other writers.

But the publication of Appearance and Reality by the same author marked a great advance in philosophical criticism of ethical postulates, and a growing dissatisfaction with current reconciliations between moral first principles and the conclusions of metaphysics.

It is curious, in the first place, to find the independence of moral philosophy upon metaphysics supported by metaphysical arguments.

And the need which most philosophers have felt for some philosophical foundation for morality arises, not from any desire to subordinate moral insight to speculative theory, but because the moral facts themselves are inexplicable except in the light of first principles which metaphysics alone can criticize.

But it may be doubted whether he succeeds in clearly distinguishing ethical feelings from ethical judgments, and if they are to be treated as synonymous it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that the implications of moral " judgment " must involve a reference to metaphysics.

Psychology or metaphysics tend in their systems to usurp the place of authority formerly assigned to ethics proper.

A comparison of these tropes with the ten tropes enumerated in the article Aenesidemus shows that scepticism has made an advance into the more abtruse questions of metaphysics.

He went first to University College, London; at Heidelberg he worked at German; at Berlin he studied psychology, metaphysics and also physiology under du Bois-Reymond, and heard lectures on Hegel, Kant and the history of philosophy, ancient and modern.

While he preached every Sunday, he also gradually took up in his lectures in the university almost every branch of theology and philosophy - New Testament exegesis, introduction to and interpretation of the New Testament, ethics (both philosophic and Christian), dogmatic and practical theology, church history, history of philosophy, psychology, dialectics (logic and metaphysics), politics, pedagogy and aesthetics.

But they frame their stories, necessarily and naturally, in harmony with their general theory of things, with what we may call " savage metaphysics."

These are the doctrines of animism, and, according to the usual anthropological theory, these spirits come to thrive to god's estate in favourable circumstances, as where the dead man, when alive, had great man y or wakan, a great share of the ether, so to speak, which, in savage metaphysics, is the viewless vehicle of magical influences.

Thus the doctrines of evolution and of creation, or the making of things, stand apart, or blend, in the metaphysics and religion of the lowest and least progressive of known peoples.

This, of course, is not metaphysics, but theology.

The allegorical interpretations and metaphysics which had been imported into religion had taken men's minds away from the plain sense of the Koran.

Accordingly, the expositors of religious metaphysics, Ghazal" included, are the enemies of true religion, because they make it a mere matter of syllogism.

The real bearing of old questions, and the meaninglessness of many disputes, were seen in the new conception of Aristotelianism given by the Metaphysics and other treatises.

But some conceptions are such that the more distinct they are made the more contradictory their elements become; so to change and supplement these as to make them at length thinkable is the problem of the second part of philosophy, or metaphysics.

In his Psychology Herbart rejects altogether the doctrine of mental faculties as one refuted by his metaphysics, and tries to show that all psychical phenomena whatever result from the action and interaction of elementary ideas or presentations (Vorstellungen).

In pure metaphysics the term "immanence-philosophy" is given to a doctrine held largely by German philosophers (Rehmke, Leclair, Schuppe and others) according to which all reality is reduced to elements immanent in consciousness.

Renan began to perceive the essential contradiction between the metaphysics which he studied and the faith that he professed, but an appetite for truths that can be verified restrained his scepticism.

In 1770 he obtained the chair of logic and metaphysics at Konigsberg, and delivered as his inaugural address the dissertation De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et principiis.

He withdrew in 1794 from society; next year he gave up all his classes but one public lecture on logic or metaphysics; and in 1797, before the removal of the interdict on his theological teaching, he ceased altogether his public labours, after an academic course of fortytwo years.

He previously, in the same year, finished his treatises on the Metaphysics of Ethics, which, with his Anthropology, completed in 1798, were the last considerable works that he revised with his own hand.

His memory began to fail, and a large work at which he wrought night and day, on the connexion between physics and metaphysics, was found to be only a repetition of his already published doctrines.

So soon as we make clear to ourselves the essential nature of this method, we are able to discern the specific difficulties or perplexities arising ' See further Idealism; Metaphysics; Logic, &c., where Kant's relation to subsequent thought is discussed.

In respect to them, the final result was found in a series of irreducible notions or categories, the prima possibilia, the analysis and elucidation of which was specifically the business of philosophy or metaphysics.

Metaphysics, on the other hand, is analytical in method; in it the notions are given, and by analysis they are cleared up. It is to be observed that the description of mathematics as synthetic is not an anticipation of the critical doctrine on the same subject.

He is inclined, therefore, to regard as the function of metaphysics the complete statement of these ultimate, indemonstrable notions, and therefore the determination of the limits to knowledge by their means.

Before the publication of the texts, when they were known only by hearsay, the term Abhidhamma was usually rendered "Metaphysics."

There is no metaphysics in it at all, only psychological ethics of a peculiarly dry and scholastic kind.

In the course of further centuries these books in turn were superseded by new treatises; and in one school at least, that of the Maha-yana (great vehicle) there was eventually developed a system of metaphysics.

His more general research interests include metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and Early Modern Philosophy, especially Descartes and Locke.

They point up the poverty of false metaphysics to rid us of the temptation of doing metaphysics this way.

Jude Currivan PhD is a healer and scientist who has studied metaphysics and experienced multi-dimensional realities since early childhood.

Metaphor has replaced metaphysics and the Western-style rhetoric has replaced mystery.

Theology (the science that reflects on revelation) must be permitted to transform metaphysics.

Contrary to postmodern critique, Mozart's contemporaries rejected disembodied metaphysics.

Menger's understanding of economic theory is essentialist and grounded in Aristotelian metaphysics.

It illustrates well how energetic and vital, and how fruitful, is much of the debate in contemporary metaphysics.

Although he rejects traditional metaphysics, he does not share either the program of logical positivism or that of ordinary language philosophy.

It is really just a suggestion of how we might come to terms with the Eastern idea of enlightenment by looking at western metaphysics.

The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics.

My argument is that mechanical realist metaphysics are necesssary in order to make it seamless.

Kant's critical philosophy thus undercuts what rationalist metaphysics had offered as proofs for the existence of God.

I don't think any linguistic metaphysics is of any value unless account is taken of the points that it raises.

The mode of thought which dominates the modern capitalist philosophy and science is called the metaphysics.

Sometimes, however, doctrine becomes so intertwined with the older metaphysics that they are difficult to separate.

Metaphysics as Metaphor Many philosophers think that physicalism is a naturalistic metaphysics as Metaphor Many philosophers think that physicalism is a naturalistic metaphysics.

How does this issue impact not only on inter-faith dialog but on the underlying metaphysics and theology of this question?

The body may perhaps compensates for the loss of a true metaphysics.

The investigations will then naturally divide themselves into three parts, the first of which deals with those to our mind inevitable forms in which we are obliged to think about things, if we think at all (metaphysics), the second being devoted to the great region of facts, trying to apply the results of metaphysics to these, specially the two great regions of external and mental phenomena (cosmology and psychology), the third dealing with those standards of value from which we pronounce our aesthetical or ethical approval or disapproval.

The key to Lotze's theoretical philosophy lies in his metaphysics, to the exposition of which important subject the first and last of his larger publications have been devoted.

The object of his metaphysics is so to remodel the current notions regarding the existence of things and their connexions with which the usage of language supplies us as to make them consistent and thinkable.

The universal substance, which we may call the absolute, is at this stage of our investigations not endowed with the attributes of a personal Deity, and it will remain to be seen by further analysis in how far we are able - without contradiction - to identify it with the object of religious veneration, in how far that which to metaphysics is merely a postulate can be gradually brought nearer to us and become a living power.

There are the central dogmas of logic, metaphysics and physics, from which start the subsequent inquiries of Locke, Leibnitz and Newton.

Regis, by removing the paradoxes and adjusting the metaphysics to the popular powers of apprehension, made Cartesianism popular, and reduced it to a regular system.

Accordingly Aquinas prepared himself on this side by commentaries on Aristotle's De Inter pretatione, on his Posterior Analytics, on the Metaphysics, the Physics, the De Anima, and on Aristotle's other psychological and physical writings, each commentary having for its aim to lay hold of the material and grasp the method contained and employed in each treatise.

Forty times, it is said, he read through the Metaphysics of Aristotle, till the words were imprinted on his memory; but their meaning was hopelessly obscure, until one day they found illumination from the little commentary by Farabi, which he bought at a bookstall for the small sum of three dirhems. So great was his joy at the discovery, thus made by help of a work from which he had expected only mystery, that he hastened to return thanks to God, and bestowed an alms upon the poor.

The Logic and Metaphysics have been printed more than once, the latter, e.g., at Venice in 1493, 1495 and 1546.

Geulincx carried out to their extreme consequences the irreconcilable elements in the Cartesian metaphysics, and his works have the peculiar value attaching to the vigorous development of a one-sided principle.

Lotze resolves space into " ideal space "; and finally, in the philosophy of religion, or in view of the thought of God (in his Metaphysics), he denies the objective existence of time.

At this time he began the publication, with critical apparatus, of Boetius (De Arithmetica), and Aristotle's Physics (1492), Ethics (1497), Metaphysics (150 I) and Politics (1506).

He expressed in an eager, disjointed, but condensed and laboured fashion, certain deep-lying convictions - that philosophy must come back from unsubstantial metaphysics to the solid facts of human nature and natural science, that the human body was no less important than the human spirit ("Der Mensch ist was er isst") and that Christianity was utterly out of harmony with the age.

We never find in Bacon himself any consciousness of originality; he is rather a keen and systematic thinker, working in a wellbeaten track, from which his contemporaries were being drawn by theology and metaphysics.

In he was chosen professor at the gymnasium of his native town, in 1763 librarian to the university, in 1770 professor of rhetoric, and in 1782 of logic and metaphysics.

It shows the influence of the Sepher Yesirah, is marked by the teaching of a celestial Trinity, is a rough outline of what the Zohar was destined to be, and gave the first opening to a thorough study of metaphysics among the Jews.

It is thus contrasted with metaphysics, which considers the nature of reality, and with psychology, which deals with the objective part of cognition, and, as Prof. James Ward said, "is essentially genetic in its method" (Mind, April 1883, pp. 166-167).

Moreover, even in the Categories as names signifying distinct things they imply distinct things; and hence the Categories, as well as the Metaphysics, draws the metaphysical conclusion that individual substances are the things without which there is nothing else, and thereby lays the positive foundation of the philosophy running through all the extant Aristotelian writings.