Quotes About Metaphysics

Metaphysiker sind Musiker ohne musikalische Fähigkeit.

Wir werden einen Satz wie Die Welt ist die Selbstverwirklichung Gottes nicht widerlegen, indem wir etwa zu beweisen versuchen: Die Welt ist nicht die Selbstverwirklichung Gottes. Damit würden wir, wo die Metaphysiker den Bock melken, das Sieb unterhalten.

metaphysics, the mood becomes that of dialectical uniformity and disinterestedness, which ponder sin as something that cannot withstand the scrutiny of thought. The concept of sin is also altered, for sin is indeed to be overcome, yet

I take seriously the idea that we're in a simulation. I have no idea whether or not it's true, but if it is, if we are in a simulation, it's not that nothing is real, not that there are no tables and chairs and trees. Rather, it's that they exist in a different form from what we first thought. There's a level of computation underneath what we take to be physical reality.

Both ignorance and the old metaphysics tend to produce these undesirable nervous effects of reversed order and so non-survival evaluation. If we use the nervous ystem in a way which is against its survival structure, we must expect non-survival. Human history is short, but already we have astonishing records of extinction.

NOUMENON, n. That which exists, as distinguished from that which merely seems to exist, the latter being a phenomenon. The noumenon is a bit difficult to locate; it can be apprehended only be a process of reasoning—which is a phenomenon. Nevertheless, the discovery and exposition of noumena offer a rich field for what Lewes calls the endless variety and excitement of philosophic thought. Hurrah (therefore) for the noumenon!

Part II of this book, metaphysics moves into concrete manifestation. You can do these meditations yourself easily, experiencing firsthand the expanded possibilities of being your own placebo. The goal here is to change your beliefs and perceptions about your life at a biological level so that you are, in essence, loving a new future into concrete material existence.

Too many metaphysicians have spent too many years trying to make a spiritual God increase their human sense of good instead of being willing to abandon the human sense of good for the spiritual reality.

Philosophers, especially metaphysicians, explore features of reality and of our mental life that are different from those explored by scientists.

I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.

The soul, which is the first principle of life, is not a body, but the act of a body; just as heat, which is the principle of calefaction, is not a body, but an act of a body.

During the more than half a millennium when Catholics were using the university to develop theology, metaphysics, physics and eventually the sciences that led to the industrial revolution, scholarship for Jews meant studying the Talmud, which meant among other things, learning how to cheat the goyim in business transactions and then justify those practices with a veneer of pious rationalization. This is not my opinion; it is the verdict of Heinrich Graetz, the father of Jewish historiography,

Absolute certainty is no more attainable in metaphysics than it is in any other field of rational inquiry and it is unfair to criticize metaphysics for failing to deliver what no other discipline - not even mathematics - is expected to deliver.

the moral views now associated in the secularist mind with superstition and ignorance in fact follow inexorably from a consistent application of the metaphysical ideas we've traced back through Aquinas and the other Scholastic thinkers to Plato and Aristotle, the very greatest of the Greek founders of the Western intellectual tradition.

Change just is the realization of some potentiality; or as Aquinas puts it, "motion is the actuality of a being in potency

A metafísica e a ciência não são pois rivais, mas colaboradoras na obra do conhecimento, e a concepção metafísica e a científica não devem ser representadas como duas esferas opostas, mas como dois círculos concêntricos.

What I am is a thinking soul, not a piece of matter, and I know about this soul and its thoughts better than I know about any physical thing. Because

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.

If we are continuously producing things which have no attribute of matter, there must be in us some element which is not matter, to produce them. This element we call spirit.

A spirit differs from a material thing by having no parts. Once we have mastered the meaning of this, we are close to our goal.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

Santo Tomás de Aquino lo explicaba con este ejemplo: «saber que alguien viene no es saber que Pedro viene aunque sea Pedro el que viene». A través de la oración y la contemplación podemos, a partir de esta intuición, identificar a quien ahora solo vislumbramos. Por ejemplo, el anhelo de sentido y verdad que todos compartimos es, según David Bentley Hart, «simplemente una manifestación de la estructura metafísica de la realidad».

Medieval metaphysicians believed nature pointed to God. Nominalists did not.

El filósofo transforma los planteamientos iniciales relativos al concepto, y afirma la existencia de un «mundo de las ideas», que es modelo del mundo real. Este mundo es para Platón mucho más real que el que habitualmente llamamos «realidad». El mundo de las ideas es incluso, por así decir, el único mundo real.