形而上学英文版.docx

1、形而上学英文版Metaphysics First published Mon Sep 10, 2007 It is not easy to say what metaphysics is. Ancient and Medieval philosophers might have said that metaphysics was, like chemistry or astrology, to be defined by its subject matter: metaphysics was the “science” that studied “being as such” or “the

2、first causes of things” or “things that do not change.” It is no longer possible to define metaphysics that way, and for two reasons. First, a philosopher who denied the existence of those things that had once been seen as constituting the subject-matter of metaphysicsfirst causes or unchanging thin

3、gswould now be considered to be making thereby a metaphysical assertion. Secondly, there are many philosophical problems that are now considered to be metaphysical problems (or at least partly metaphysical problems) that are in no way related to first causes or unchanging things; the problem of free

4、 will, for example, or the problem of the mental and the physical. This entry examines a large selection of the problems that have been classified as metaphysical. It does not examine them “for their own sake,” however, but as illustrations of metaphysical problems. (The discussions of these problem

5、s in this entry, therefore, are not meant to be in competition with the entries specifically devoted to them.) It considersand finds no satisfactory answer tothe question, “In virtue of what common feature are these problems classified as metaphysical problems?” It also considers various attempts to

6、 show that metaphysicshowever definedis an impossible enterprise. 1. The word metaphysics? and the concept of metaphysics. 2. The problems of metaphysics: the “old” metaphysics 2.1 The categories of being 2.2 Substance 3. The problems of metaphysics: the “new” metaphysics 3.1 Modality 3.2 Problems o

7、f space and time 3.3 Problems about the mental and the physical 3.4 The problem of free will 3.5 Problems of material constitution 4. The Nature of Metaphysics 5. Is Metaphysics Possible? Bibliography Other Internet Resources Related Entries - 1. The word metaphysics? and the concept of metaphysics.

8、 The word metaphysics? is notoriously hard to define. Twentieth-century coinages like meta-language? and metaphilosophy? encourage the impression that metaphysics is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study devoted to matters that transcend the mundane concerns of Newton and Einstein and

9、Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken. The word metaphysics? is derived from a collective title of the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think of as making up “Aristotles Metaphysics.” Aristotle himself did not know the word. (He had four names for the branch of philosophy that is the

10、subject-matt er of Metaphysics: first philosophy?, first science?, wisdom?, and theology?.) At least one hundred years after Aristotles death, an editor of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of Rhodes) entitled those fourteen books “Ta meta ta phusika”“the after the physicals” or “the ones af

11、ter the physical ones”, the “physical ones” being the books contained in what we now call Aristotles Physics. The title was probably meant to warn students of Aristotles philosophy that they should attempt Metaphysics only after they had mastered “the physical ones,” the books about nature or the na

12、tural worldthat is to say, about change, for change is the defining feature of the natural world. This is the probable meaning of the title because Metaphysics is about things that do not change. In one place, Aristotle identifies the subject-matter of first philosophy as “being as such,” and, in an

13、other, as “first causes.” It is a niceand vexedquestion what the connection between these two definitions is. Perhaps this is the answer: The unchanging first causes have nothing but being in common with the mutable things they causelike us and the objects of our experience, they are, and there the

14、resemblance ceases. (For a detailed and informative recent guide to Aristotles Metaphysics, see Politis (2004).) The Greek plural noun-phrase ta meta ta phusika? became in Medieval Latin the singular noun metaphysica?much as the Greek plural ta biblia? (the books?) became the Latin singular biblia?

15、(the bible?). The word was used both as a title for Aristotles book (now thought of as a single entity) and as the name of the “science” that was its subject-matter. The word for metaphysics? in every modern European language (la mtaphysique?, die Metaphysik?, la metafisica?) is an adaptation of the

16、 Latin word to the orthographic and phonetic requirements of that language. This is true even of the non-Indo-European languages (like Finnish and Hungarian) that are spoken in Europe. Works written in some non-European languages, however, use words constructed from native materials both to translat

17、e the European word metaphysics? and to refer to writings in their own philosophical traditions whose subject-matter is similar to the subject-matter of Western metaphysics. For example, the Chinese phrase that is the customary translation of metaphysics? is an allusion to a statement in the I Ching

18、: “that which is above matter is the Tao”; the phrase can be literally translated as that which is above matter-ology?, the final word of the phrase being a “discipline marker” that performs much the same function as the English suffix -ology?. The word that is the usual Arabic translation of metaph

19、ysics? means the science of divine things?. Unlike the Chinese phrase and the Arabic word, however, the European words derived from metaphysica? carry no internal indications of their meaning. (The word has, as we have seen, an etymology, but as is so often the case, etymology is no guide to meaning

20、.) It is uncontroversial that these words all mean exactly what metaphysics? means in Englishor, less parochially, that all the European words derived from metaphysica? mean exactly the same thing. But what is it that they all mean? Can the origin of the word help us to answer this question? Can we

21、say that the word metaphysics? is a name for that “science” (that episteme, that scientia, that study, that discipline) whose subject-matter is the subject-matter of Aristotles Metaphysics? If we do say this, we shall be committed to some thesis in the neighborhood of the following theses: “The subj

22、ect-matter of metaphysics is being as such?”; “The subject-matter of metaphysics is the first causes of things”; “The subject-matter of metaphysics is that which does not change.” Any of these three theses might have been regarded as a defensible statement of the subject-matter of what was currently

23、 called “metaphysics” till the seventeenth century, when, rather suddenly, many topics and problems that Aristotle and the Medievals would have classified as belonging to physics (the relation of mind and body, for example, or the freedom of the will, or personal identity across time) began to be “r

24、eassigned” to metaphysics. One might almost say that in the seventeenth century “metaphysics” began to be a catch-all category, a repository of philosophical problems that could not be otherwise classified: “not epistemology, not logic, not ethics ”. (It was at about that time that the word “ontolog

25、y” was inventedto be a name for the science of being as such, an office that the word metaphysics? could no longer fill.) The academic rationalists of the post-Leibnizian school were aware that the word metaphysics? had come to be used in a more inclusive sense than it had once been. Christian Wolff

26、 attempted to justify this more inclusive sense of the word by this device: while the subject-matter of metaphysics is being, being can be investigated either in general or in relation to objects in particular categories. He distinguished between “general metaphysics,” (or ontology) the study of bei

27、ng as such, and the various branches of “special metaphysics,” which study the being of objects of various special sorts, such as souls and material bodies. (He does not assign “first causes” to general metaphysics, however: the study of first causes belongs to natural theology, a branch of special

28、metaphysics.) It is doubtful whether this maneuver is anything more than a verbal ploy. In what sense, for example, is the practitioner of rational psychology (the branch of special metaphysics devoted to the soul) engaged in a study of “being”? Has a soul a different sort of being from that of othe

29、r objects?so that in studying the soul one learns not only about its nature (that is, its properties: rationality, immateriality, immortality, its ca pacity or lack thereof to affect the body ), but about its “mode of being,” and hence learns something about being? It is certainly not true that all,

30、 or even very many, rational psychologists said anything, qua rational psychologists, that could plausibly be construed as a contribution to our understanding of being. Perhaps this development, this wider application of the word metaphysics?, was due to the fact that the word physics? was coming to

31、 be a name for a new, quantitative science, the science th at bears that name today, and was becoming increasingly inapplicable to the investigation of many traditional philosophical problems about changing things (and of some newly discovered problems about changing things). Whatever the reason for

32、 the change may have been, it would be flying in the face of current usage (and indeed of the usage of the last three or four hundred years) to stipulate that the subject-matter of metaphysics was to be the subject-matter of Aristotles Metaphysics (or that it was to be “that which is above matter” or “divine things”). It would, moreover, fly in the face of the fact that, in the current sense of the word, there are and have been paradigmatic metaphysicians who deny that there are first causesth