User:Phlsph7/Metaphysics - History

History


The history of metaphysics examines how the inquiry into the basic structure of reality has evolved in the course of history. Metaphysics has its origin in speculations about the nature and origin of the cosmos that go back to ancient civilizations. In ancient India starting in the 7th century BCE, the Upanishads were written as religious and philosophical texts that examine how ultimate reality constitutes the ground of all being. They further explore the nature of the self and how it can reach liberation by understanding ultimate reality. This period also saw the emergence of Buddhism in the 6th century BCE, which denies the existence of an independent self and understands the world as a cyclic process. At about the same time in ancient China, the school of Daoism was formed and explored the natural order of the universe, known as Dao, and how it is characterized by the interplay of yin and yang as two correlated forces.

In ancient Greece, metaphysics emerged in the 6th century BCE with the pre-Socratic philosophers, who gave rational explanations of the whole cosmos by examining the first principles from which everything arises. Following them, Plato (427–347 BCE) formulated his theory of forms, which states that eternal forms or ideas possess the highest kind of reality while the material world is only an imperfect reflection of them. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) accepted Plato's idea that there are universal forms but held that they cannot exist on their own but depend on matter. He also proposed a system of categories and developed a comprehensive framework of the natural world through his theory of the four causes. Starting in the 4th century BCE, Hellenistic philosophy explored the rational order underlying the cosmos and the idea that it is made up of indivisible atoms. Neoplatonism emerged towards the end of the ancient period in the 3rd century CE and introduced the idea of "the One" as a transcendent and ineffable entity that is the source of all of creation.

Meanwhile in Indian Buddhism, the Madhyamaka school developed the idea that all phenomena are inherently empty without a permanent essence while the consciousness-only doctrine of the Yogācāra school stated that experienced objects are mere transformations of consciousness that do not reflect external reality. The Hindu school of Samkhya philosophy introduced a metaphysical dualism with pure consciousness and matter as its fundamental categories. In China, the school of Xuanxue explored metaphysical problems such as the contrast between being and non-being.



Medieval Western philosophy was strongly influenced by ancient Greek philosophy. Boethius (477–524 CE) attempted to harmonize Plato's and Aristotle's theories of universals by stating that universals can exist both in matter and in the mind. His theory inspired the philosophies of nominalism and conceptualism, as in the thought of Peter Abelard (1079–1142 CE). Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274 CE) understood metaphysics as the discipline that investigates the different meanings of being, such as the contrast between substance and accident, and principles applying to all beings, such as the principle of identity. William of Ockham (1285–1347 CE) proposed the methodological principles of Ockham's razor as a tool to decide between competing metaphysical theories. Arabic–Persian philosophy, which had its prime period from the early 9th century CE to the late 12th century CE, employed many ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers to interpret and clarify the teachings of the Quran. Avicenna (980–1037 CE) developed a comprehensive philosophical system that examined the contrast between existence and essence and distinguished between contingent and necessary existence. Medieval India saw the emergence of the monist school of Advaita Vedanta in the 8th century CE, which holds that everything is one and that the idea of many entities existing independently is an illusion. In China, Neo-Confucianism arose in the 9th century CE and explored the concept of li as the rational principle that is the ground of being and reflects the order of the universe.

In the early modern period, René Descartes (1596–1650) developed a substance dualism according to which body and mind exist as independent entities that causally interact. This idea was rejected by Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), who formulated a monist philosophy according to which there is only one substance that has both physical and mental attributes developing side-by-side without interacting. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) introduced the concept of possible worlds and articulated a metaphysical system, known as monadology, that understands the universe as a collection of simple substances that are synchronized without causally interacting with one another. Christian Wolff (1679–1754), conceptualized the scope of metaphysics by introducing the distinction between general and special metaphysics. According to the idealism of George Berkeley (1685–1753), everything is mental, including material objects, which are ideas perceived by the mind. David Hume (1711–1776) made various contributions to metaphysics, including the regularity theory of causation and the idea that there are no necessary connections between distinct entities. At the same time, his empiricist outlook led him to formulate a stark criticism of metaphysical theories that aim to arrive at ultimate principles inaccessible to sensory experience. This skeptical outlook was embraced by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). He tried to reconceptualize metaphysics as a critical inquiry into the basic principles and categories of thought and understanding rather than seeing it as an attempt to comprehend mind-independent reality.

Many developments in the later modern period were shaped by Kant's philosophy. German idealists employed his idealistic outlook in their attempt to find a unifying principle as the foundation of all reality. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) developed a comprehensive system of philosophy in which he examined how absolute spirit manifests itself. He inspired the British idealism of Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924), who interpreted absolute spirit as the all-inclusive totality of being. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a strong critic of German idealism and articulated a different metaphysical vision that takes a blind and irrational will as the underlying principle of reality. Pragmatists like C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) and John Dewey (1859–1952) conceived metaphysics as an observational science of the most general features of reality and experience.



In the 20th century, Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) and other logical positivists formulated a wide-ranging criticism of metaphysical statements by holding that they are meaningless since there is no way to verify them. Another criticism of traditional metaphysics was articulated by ordinary language philosophers who identified misunderstandings of ordinary language as the source of many traditional metaphysical problems. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) developed process metaphysics as an attempt to provide a holistic description of both the objective and the subjective worlds. Logical atomists, like Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), conceived the world as a multitude of atomic facts, which inspired later metaphysicians such as D. M. Armstrong (1926–2014). Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) tried to naturalize metaphysics by connecting it to the empirical sciences. His student David Lewis (1941–2001) employed the concept of possible worlds to formulate his modal realism. In continental philosophy, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) engaged in ontology through a phenomenological description of experience while his student Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) developed fundamental ontology as an attempt to clarify the meaning of being. Heidegger's philosophy inspired general criticisms of metaphysics by postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).