Metaphysics: The Study of Being

Metafisica and The Study of Being

• Metafisica explores the essence of things and the types of changes things can undergo without losing their identity.
• It questions the existence of entities beyond physical objects perceivable by our senses, such as numbers, qualities, facts, and God.
• Metafisica inquires into the nature of consciousness, causation, the laws of nature, the existence of justice and love, and the fundamental reasons for existence.
• It seeks a deeper understanding of the structure of the world, focusing on the essence of things rather than how we come to know them
• Aristotle defined metafísica as the study of being as being, even without using the term.

Origin of the Term

• The term "metafísica" is traditionally attributed to Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BC).
• Andronicus organized Aristotle's writings and grouped together works that didn't fit into natural philosophy, logic, or ethics.
• He placed these books after the books on physics, naming them "those after the physics" or "the things behind the physical things," indicating their placement in the library.
• Metafisica thus studies reality in a broader and deeper sense than science does.

Reality

• Reality is intuitively understood as everything that exists.
• It explores existence of unicorns, dragons, love, beauty, justice and atoms like trees or horses.
• The fundamental pursuit of metafísica is clarifying intuitions about reality.

Two Basic Conceptions of Reality:

• In a restrictive sense, reality encompasses everything around us that we can experience either through our senses or with instruments.
• This concept aligns with the scientific view of physical or material reality.
• In a broad sense, reality includes not only material beings observable by science but also subjective realities, cultural products, and immaterial entities.
• It encompasses the essence of things, even those unobservable aspects that give meaning to material reality.
• Empedocles of Agrigento considered love and strife as fundamental principles of union and separation in the universe.
• Plato viewed love for particular things and individuals as reflections of love for absolute beauty, guiding the soul towards contemplation of the ideal and eternal - Using worldly beauties as steps to reach pure knowledge of the essence of beauty.

The Study of Being :

• It is a more global and ambitious type of knowledge than scientific knowledge, also accounting for aspects of reality that are not observable, lying outside scientific considerationss.
• "There is a science that studies what is, insofar as it is something that is, and the attributes that, by itself, belong to it.".
• Substance or entity is what Aristotle calls the primary form of "being."
• Substances are concrete individuals, like Socrates or this olive are the existences.
• "Second substances" are species and genres like "man," "animal," or "tree”.
• Science deals on species and genres, not with the individual realities.
• The first substance is truly real, "being" are modifications or accidents of the substance
• Substance (or “entity") and accidents are the “supreme genres” of being
• Aristotle called them “categories”.

Fundamental and Defining Characteristics of Metafísica

• Aspiration of Principiality: The principle is that from which something is or exists and can be known.
• An Integrative and Totalizing Consideration of the Real: Encompassing nature and history.
• Interrogation About the Meaning of "What Is": Questioning the meaning of everything that exists.

Orientations of Metafísica

• Different metafisical theories categorize the real in different ways.
• Monism and pluralism theories question all things consist of the same nature, reducing to a fundamental element
• Pluralism answering the diversity of nature, essence, or substance between several things
• Monism in metafísica says that only one kind of reality of which all the other "apparent" realities would be manifestations
• Realities have to be reduced in the last instance.
• The monistic positions maintained in the history of philosophy can be reduced to "materialism" or "spiritualism".

Spiritualist Metafísicas

• Certain phenomena lead us to think that there is a kind of reality different from the reality that our senses show us.
• Introspection means taking a look into our inner self, we can call them our experiences, our feelings
• Communication between humans is possible as our experiences are similar.
• Something radically subjective that, perhaps, is immaterial, spiritual.

Some Spiritualist Approaches: Platonic Idealism

• Platonic idealism states there is a reality beyond the material one, and also the mind is more superior.
• Mundo is an shadows of the ideal world.
• Real World of ideas consist of Ideas that perfect, immutable and eternal.
• Ideas are the authentic reality and essence imperceptible to the human senses
• The Idea of beauty is Beauty itself
• There is participation or imitation between Ideas and things
• World is separated into visible world and world of ideas.

Materialist Metafísicas

• Defining what matter/material is can be hard.
• Matter is what the things are composed that which we perceive through the senses.
• Reality is composed is atoms and subatomic particles.
• Philosophy has understood matter, fundamentally, such the substrate of changes
• A materialist is someone who only trusts in the knowledge that the sciences can offer.
• We have a complex and sophisticated device called the responsible brain,for all our ideas, beliefs, feelings
• There are not realities of the spiritual type, concede primacy to material reality.