Quotes About Metaphysics

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

Leibniz's most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science.

A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist's mind before he or she begins to do science.

The account presented below is patterned after the work of Christia Mercer of Columbia University. Her book Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press, is a formidable work of forensic scholarship that can in no way be improved by my attempts to summarize

Secondly, that Leibniz's most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science.

At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.

Así pues, para definir el ser, hay que decir es, y usar de ese modo el término definido en la definición».

Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.

rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them ... imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them ... for when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.

Sin religión alguna de una Divinidad, jamás los hombres en nación se concertaron; y así comode cosas físicas, o sea de los movimientos de los cuerpos, no cabeciencia segura sin la guía de las verdades abstractas de la matemática, así no cabe en las cosas morales sin el aprecio de las verdades abstractas de la metafísica, y por tanto sin la demostración de Dios.

The universe comprises all being in a totality; for nothing that exists is outside or beyond infinite being, as the latter has no outside or beyond.

An infinite body, according to us, is neither potentially nor actually mobile, neither light nor heavy potentially or actually.

Metaphysics, whatever it may be, seems still to lead men astray much more than any physics.

The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.

The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience. The metaphysician reasons from theory to facts, the scientist reasons from facts to theory. The metaphysician explains the universe by himself, the scientist explains himself by the universe.

You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong—to his own satisfaction.

The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience.

There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.

Metaphysics is a closed system;

La métaphysique n'est qu'une sorte d'appendicite idéologique.

In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: "He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information.

In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.

The monad, of which we shall speak here, is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds; simple, that is to say, without parts.

I don't do metaphysics. Neither do I have the luxury to talk about my beliefs.