Quotes About Metaphysics

Plato suggested that some of the poets be driven out of the Republic because they had the power to weaken the guardians. Poets can make it impossible to have a war-unless they tell stories that agree with the "general line" established by the state. Poets who have no metaphysics, and therefore no political line, make war impossible because they have the irresistible ability to show the guardians that what seems necessary is only possible.

Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.

Despite Schelling's aspirations and claims, he was instrumental not in the completion of metaphysics, but rather in its abandonment.

In claiming to have exhausted the dialectically structured categorial realm, Hegel claims to have completed philosophy. In fact, however, he has completed at best only first philosophy; his system represents at most the highest theoretical knowledge, that which grounds further inquiry. Grounding such inquiry is however quite different from completing it. In complete metaphysics, Hegel provides philosophical anthropology with the point from which it can begin.

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear - a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics.

No inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

It is intentionality that tears the seamless fabric of the causally closed material world.

And it illustrates a profound observation by E. A. Burtt: [I]f he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful. 19

Obviously I believe in reincarnation and all that kind of stuff - I don't think anyone's going to be surprised to hear that.

Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought?

That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity.

Anyone who builds satellites we can't shoot down needs to be taken seriously and, if they ever come back for their hardware, be approached with caution. That's not religion, it's common sense. Quellcrist Falconer Metaphysics for Revolutionaries

The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: "Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?

The great question in life is the suffering we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics do not justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him.

Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.

I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

Every thing is of the nature of no thing.

A person is an individual substance of a rational nature.

There is a great difference between mind and body insomuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.

Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.

If the universe had a beginning, its beginning, by the very condition of the cases, was supernatural; the laws of Nature cannot account for their own origin.