Van Inwagen, Peter (2008). Metaphysics. Boulder: Westview Press.
Introduction
But it is a near certainty that someone who has not actually studied metaphysics—formally, in a course of study at the university level—will have no inkling of what the word ‘metaphysics’ means.
The nature of metaphysics is best explained by example...metaphysics is the study of ultimate reality. This still seems to me to be the best definition of metaphysics I have seen.
What, one might well ask, is meant by “reality,” and what does the qualification “ultimate” mean?
We know that appearances can be deceptive...we know that most people in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was at the center of the universe and that the stars and planets were embedded in invisible spheres that revolved around the stationary earth...Today we know that the astronomical system accepted by the medievals—and by the ancient Greeks from whom the medievals inherited it—is wrong...The medievals and the ancient Greeks assumed that because they did not experience these cues when they were standing or walking about on the surface of the earth, the earth was therefore not rotating. Today we can see their mistake. “Passengers” on the earth do not experi ence vibration because the earth is spinning freely in what is essentially a vacuum... it is sometimes possible to “get behind” the appearances the world presents us with and to discover how things really are: we have discovered that the earth is really rotating, despite the fact that it is apparently stationary.
We talk about reality only when there is a misleading appearance to be “got behind” or “seen through”: the reality of the matter is that (despite appearances) the earth rotates on its axis; in reality (and de spite appearances) the heavens do not revolve around the earth...What we find behind appearance is often itself an appearance that hides a deeper reality... physicists were beginning to discover that what had been called “empty space” was really very far from empty... it was discovered that what is normally called empty space is ac tually very densely populated.
This minor episode in the history of thought sug gests a general question: Could it be that the reality behind every appearance is itself only a further appearance? If the answer to this question is No, then there is a reality that is not also an appearance. This final or “ultimate” reality is the subject matter of metaphysics.
Let us look carefully at Jane’s statement that there is no ultimate reality. Is this something that is really so or only something that is apparently so? It seems rea sonably clear that Jane means to be telling us how things really are. Paradoxically, in telling us that there is no ultimate reality, Jane is telling us that ultimate reality consists of an endless series of appearances... perhaps nothing can be discovered about ultimate reality beyond the bare fact that there is an ultimate reality.
1. What are the most general features of the World, and what sorts of things does it contain? What is the World like?
2. Why does a World exist—and, more specifically, why is there a World hav ing the features and the content described in the answer to Question 1?
3. What is our place in the World? How do we human beings fit into it?
Other sets of answers, however, would deny this assumption, and contend that all individuality is mere appearance, that in reality there are no “separate” objects at all. Both sets of an swers presuppose the reality of time, but there are those who would say that both the order of events in time (“before” and “after”) and the seeming movement or “passage” of time are mere appearances. And there are those who would say the same about space: that the familiar “here” and “there” of ordinary experience are no more than appearance.
First, metaphysics must be distinguished from the most general and all-embracing of the physical sciences: cosmology and the physics of elementary particles. (Cosmology is the part of astronomy that studies the physical universe or “cosmos” as a whole. The physics of elementary particles studies the basic building blocks of the physical universe and the laws by which they interact.)...Physical cosmology seems to show that the phys ical universe had a beginning in time (about fourteen thousand million years ago)—or at least that it does not have an infinite past throughout which it has been much the same as it is now.
But if physical cosmology is of the deepest significance for metaphysics, it nev ertheless does not and cannot answer all the questions metaphysics poses. For one thing, it cannot answer the question, Why does the World exist?... Physical cosmology, moreover, does not and cannot tell us whether the physical universe is all there is—whether there is more to the World than the physical universe.
Secondly, metaphysics must be distinguished from sacred or revealed theology. Theology is, by definition, the science or study of God. Theology partly overlaps metaphysics. What is common to theology and metaphysics is usually called philo sophical, or natural, theology.
Physical cosmology and revealed theology have their own methods and their own histories, each of which differs from the method and history of metaphysics, although the histories of the three are hard to disentangle from one another in practice.
Metaphysics, then, must be distinguished from physical cosmology and from sacred or revealed theology. But metaphysics is a part or branch of the more gen eral field of philosophy and it must also be distinguished from other parts of philosophy.
The branch of philosophy called ethics, or moral philosophy, is an inquiry into the nature of good and bad and right and wrong. Anyone who thinks about these topics will soon find that they raise metaphysical questions. Consider, for example, the statement that Hitler was an evil man. (Statements like this one are certainly a part of the subject-matter of ethics.) Many would consider this statement to be, in a quite straightforward sense, true. If it is true, the person who makes this statement would seem to be correctly ascribing to Hitler a certain feature or property called being evil. But what sort of thing is this property? It is obviously not a physical property of Hitler like his height or his weight. And if it is not a physical property, and if it really does exist, then it would seem to follow that the World in some sense contains non-physical things—for if Hitler is evil, and if evil is something non-physical, then how can the World consist entirely of matter in motion?
A deeper understanding of the concept of metaphysics can be achieved only be actually “doing” some metaphysics, and that is the task to which the remaining chapters of this book are devoted.
It can’t be that there is no body of established philosophical fact simply because philosophers are stupid. Although a few scientists have dropped hints to this effect, it would seem to be statistically unlikely that any given field of study should attract only stupid people. Besides, there have been philosophers who have demonstrated by their accomplishments outside philosophy that they were not only highly intelligent but were great geniuses. This was particularly true in the seventeenth century, when the philosopher Descartes invented analytical geometry and the philosopher Leibniz invented the infinitesimal calculus.8 Despite these ac complishments, however, when Descartes and Leibniz turned their attention to philosophy, they produced work as controversial as any other philosophical work.