Quotes About Metaphysics

1.2.2 Hylemorphism In change, there is, again, both the potential that is to be actualized and the actualization of that potential.

Hence there must not only be something by virtue of which the thing you've drawn is triangular, but also something by virtue of which it is triangular in precisely the imperfect way that it is. There must also be something by virtue of which triangularity exists in this particular point in time and space.

Every one of these claims embodies a metaphysical assumption, and science, since its very method presupposes them, could not possibly defend them without arguing in a circle. Their defense is instead a task for metaphysics, and for philosophy more generally; and scientism is shown thereby to be incoherent.

attributes. For Aquinas, God is "simple" in the sense of being in no way composed of parts (ST I.3).

For example, whereas the natural sciences are concerned with various specific kinds of material substances Ã¢â'¬â€œ stone, water, trees, fish, stars, and so on Ã¢â'¬â€œ metaphysics is concerned with questions such as what it is to be a substance of any kind in the first place. (Is a substance a mere bundle of attributes, or a substratum in which attributes inhere? Are material substances the only possible sort? And so on.) Similarly, the natural sciences are concerned with

God is the cause that is 'cause of itself' (essence) and the Universe is the effect existing within the cause (existence). Essence involves existence.

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

The final cause, then, produces motion through being loved.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

It is of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.

If we do get a quantum theory of spacetime, it should answer some of the deepest philosophical questions that we have, like what happened before the big bang?

There are big questions science doesn't answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can't be a scientific answer to that because it's the answer that precedes science.

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.

Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman.

With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal, but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them.

Misunderstanding of the dream. In the ages of crude primeval culture man believed that in dreams he got to know another real world; here is the origin of all metaphysics.

Language belongs in its origin to the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology: we find ourselves in the midst of a rude fetishism when we call to mind the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language – which is to say, of reason.

The rest is abortion and not-yet-science: which is to say metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology.

Brave and creative men never make pleasure and pain ultimate questions– they are secondary conditions: both of them must be desired when one will attain to something. It is a sign of fatigue and illness in these metaphysicians and religious men, that they should press questions of pleasure and pain into the foreground.

Christianity is a hangman's metaphysics…

To deny the necessity or value of metaphysics is to assert a metaphysical principle, just as to say a religion must be without dogmas is to assert a dogma.

Abstraction is the condition of the science of metaphysics, but in no way is its content.

Being is the soul of every concept, of every judgment and of every reasoning.