Quotes About Metaphysics

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists

5.641 [...] Das philosophische Ich ist nicht der Mensch, nicht der menschliche Körper, oder die menschliche Seele, von der die Psychologie handelt, sondern das metaphysische Subjekt, die Grenze - nicht ein Teil - der Welt.

It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and æsthetics are one.)

The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.

The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (It is certainly not the solution of any problems of natural science that is required).

6.44 : It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

Thence we pass successively to Theory of Knowledge, Principles of Physics, Ethics, and finally the Mystical (das Mystische).

e porque a dor que se dissimula dói mais, é mui provável que Virgília padecesse em dobro do que realmente devia padecer. Creio que isto é metafísica.

porque o adjetivo é a alma do idioma, a sua porção idealista e metafísica. O substantivo é a realidade nua e crua, é o naturalismo do vocabulário.

Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics....

No se obran milagros en el mundo, lo único que no comprendo es la muerte, ese engullimiento en un abismo sombrío y denso donde se pierden los sentimientos y la conciencia. ¿Acaso es un milagro? No, es poco probable: es metafísica.

P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

George MacDonald, Andrew Jackson Davis, Swedenborg.

uncaused cause, or to use Aristotle's famous expression, an Unmoved

science," for the Aristotelian, is an organized body of demonstrated truths concerning the things falling within some domain and their causes. Hence, not only physics, chemistry, biology, and the like, but also metaphysics, ethics, natural theology, and indeed the philosophy of nature itself (since, for the Aristotelian-Thomistic thinker, these fields of inquiry rest on rational arguments and analysis no less than physics, chemistry, etc. do) count as sciences.

Better in most contexts (such as the present one) once again to acquiesce to standard contemporary usage and classify fields like metaphysics, ethics, natural theology, philosophy of nature, etc. as branches of philosophy rather than of "science.

I have indicated, the most fundamental concepts of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of nature (the theory of actuality and potentiality, hylemorphism, and so forth) overlap with those of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.

What is the epistemology of the philosophy of nature itself? Is it an a priori discipline the way that mathematics and metaphysics are often claimed to be? Or are its claims subject to empirical falsification the way that those of natural science typically are? These

The emphasis in philosophy of nature is always on metaphysical questions, whereas the accent in the philosophy of science (at least where it isn't essentially just philosophy of nature under another name) is on epistemological and methodological issues.

Even those modern secularists and liberals who hate the metaphysics illustrated by Plato's allegory of the cave thrill to the idea that the common man is in the grip of illusion and ought to be ruled by philosopher-kings, even if their idea of a philosopher-king would have filled Plato with abject horror.