Quotes About Metaphysics

In thinking the of the eternal, we must link the eternal with the accidentality of our thinking

Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.

Consciousness of myself, combined with complete ignorance of everything that does not fall within my sphere of thinking, is the most telling proof of my substantiality outside God, of my original existence.

I'm very interested in theories in how we exist: how people exist and how souls exist separate from their bodies or their brains.

The soul is joined to and is separated from the body. Therefore, the soul is corporeal.

Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day.

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

Soon after Plato's death, Aristotle attacked the theory in On Philosophy, later expanding his criticism in his Metaphysics. He denied that a form could exist without matter, and the realm of Forms possessed, he believed, no objective validity. Plato put forth nothing but words—what Aristotle disparaged as "empty phrases and poetical metaphors.

The sudden appearance of all the Laws of Nature is as untestable as Platonic metaphysics or theology. Why should we assume that all the Laws of Nature were already present at the instant of the Big Bang, like a cosmic Napoleonic code? Perhaps some of them, such as those that govern protein crystals, or brains, came into being when protein crystals or brains first arose. The preexistence of these laws cannot possibly be tested before the emergence of the phenomena they govern.

Hegel claimed that reality was essentially reason and logic – "whatever is rational is real, and whatever is real is rational".

I am composed of the formal and the material; and neither of them will perish into non-existence, as neither of them came into existence out of non-existence. Every part of me then will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another part of the universe, and so on for ever.

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Genesis is not metaphysically neutral—it mandates an affirmation of teleology (purpose), even as it leaves open the descriptive mechanism for material origins.

The Jedi Order was more than an unpaid police force, more than just an exercise club that was into metaphysics. It was a way of life, based on the Jedi Code—and a lot of rules for living that weren't in the Code, that had been tacked on later. One was that Jedi avoided becoming involved in romantic relationships. Once on the run, Kanan Jarrus had found that rule pretty easy to forget about.

The concept of substance is the central tenet of Spinoza's metaphysics. All things exist and are conceived through substance, or God, or nature, which exists and is conceived only through itself. Substance represents the singular binding force that connects things, no matter how small or disconnected in space and time they might be, for every thing participates in and is a part of a complex totality.

For Spinoza, an ethics and a politics follow directly from and are immanent in metaphysics; the better one understands the universe in its complexity, in the connections that link each thing to every other, the more adequate is one's ethical relation in and to it. An ethics does not spring directly from our understanding of the world. Rather, it comes from our affective bonds to and connections with other things in the world, relations that enable us to enhance or diminish forms of life.

Aristotle's Politics, like his Metaphysics, turns Plato's system upside down.

All forms of humanism, Heidegger proclaimed, lead inevitably to metaphysics, since they presuppose a human being with a fixed rational nature. Instead of freeing man, the humanist view actually reduces Being's infinite possibilities to the dim, stunted creature of the modern age.

His name was Parmenides, and in answer to Heraclitus's claim that everything changes, Parmenides countered by arguing that nothing changes. Far from permanency being an illusion, as Heraclitus claimed, it is change that is the illusion.

One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 This reversal left Aristotle's philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.

Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.

Of the two alternatives - a curved manifold in a Euclidean space of ten dimensions or a manifold with non-Euclidean geometry and no extra dimensions - which is right? I would rather not attempt a direct answer, because I fear I should get lost in a fog of metaphysics. But I may say at once that I do not take the ten dimensions seriously; whereas I take the non-Euclidean geometry of the world very seriously, and I do not regard it as a thing which needs explaining away.

The demarcation between science and metaphysics is determined by the limits of experiential inquiry, not Nature or God.