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Monday 27 November 2006

Completed Metaphysics


The epoch of completed metaphysics stands before its beginning ....
[Martin Heidegger, 'The End of Metaphysics']



"So long as man exists, philosophising of some sort occurs. Philosophy - what we call philosophy - is Metaphysics getting underway; in which philosophy comes to itself & to its explicit tasks".
[Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?]

"All Metaphysics, including its opponent, positivism, speaks the language of Plato".
[Heidegger, The End of Philosophy & the Task of Thinking]

"Metaphysics cannot be abolished like an opinion".
[Heidegger, The End of philosophy]

Seeing that Heidegger finds Metaphyics to be ultimately necessary to our Being as Thinkers, then how do we define Metaphysics?

The clue is there in the word 'Being'; Metaphysics is the study of Being.

Being is Existence in the widest sense. Not only does Metaphysics attempt to study the beingness of all beings, it also seeks to study the being of being itself.

So Metaphysics is the most fundamental and basic of all studies; that of Ultimate Reality.

It will deal with;

Reality,
Existence,
Substance,
Forms,
Universals,
Essences,
Categories,
Time,
Mind,
Causality,
etc.,

But Metaphysics is not carried out by using sensory experience, empirical experiment etc.,
That is the method of Physics, and Metaphysics is prior to Physics.

Metaphysics relies completely on rational analysis, on rational inquiry.

See the work of the ancient Greeks; Pre-Socratics, like Parmenides, or the greats like Plato and Aristotle.
And in the modern era great Germanic philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, who have taken up the Aryan baton of thought passed to them by the Greeks.