Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that asks what exists, what it is to exist, and what is most fundamental. The name comes from the title given by ancient editors to the books of Aristotle placed “after the Physics”; Aristotle himself called the subject “first philosophy”, the study of being as being and of the first causes.

Its questions include the nature of being, substance and change, the relation of the one and the many, universals and particulars, causation, time, possibility and necessity, and the existence and nature of God. In the Neoplatonic, Indian, Islamic and Christian traditions, metaphysics was also the theory of the ultimate source and of the soul’s return to it.

Kant argued that speculative metaphysics oversteps the limits of human knowledge, and later critics, from the logical positivists to Heidegger, attacked it in different ways. Metaphysics has nonetheless returned as a central field of philosophy, and the comparative study of the traditions is in large part the comparison of their metaphysics.