Quotes About Metaphysics

How comes the world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place? ... from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.

The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.

L'intelligence humaine, dit Auguste Comte, passe successivement par trois états : L'état théologique ou fictif (êtres divins) ; L'état métaphysique ou abstrait (nature, être) ; L'état scientifique ou positif (observation, empirisme).

In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.

Mais, si le souvenir n'a pas été emmagasiné par le cerveau, où donc se conserve-t-il ? - A vrai dire, je ne suis pas sûr que la question "où" ait encore un sens quand on ne parle plus d'un corps.

But this metaphysics, like this science, has enfolded its deeper life in a rich tissue of symbols, forgetting something that, while science needs symbols for its analytical development, the main object of metaphysics is to do away with symbols.

A biblical metaphysics implies a biblical theory of knowledge and a biblical ethic.

The atomists knew that causation must start from something, and that no cause can be assigned to this original something. Motion was simply a given. The atomists asked mechanistic questions and gave mechanistic answers. When they asked "Why?" they meant: what was the cause of an event? When their successors—Plato, Aristotle, and so on—asked "Why?" they were searching for the purpose of an event.

I've been reading about the idea of cyclical lives - it matches up to the idea of string theory and a multiverse. So I wanted to write a record about that instead of another song about broken hearts and drinking.

Culture cannot be separated from politics. The arts, philosophy and metaphysics, religion and the sciences, constitute culture. Politics are the science or art of organizing our relationships to allow for the development of life in society.

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek

what is the nature of reality?

A partir de estas definiciones, Spinoza procede por medio de pruebas euclidianas a construir un sistema determinista e irrefutable que abarca todo el universo.

When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter " And proved it - 'twas no matter what he said.

In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.

Respecting infinite sets, for example, Intuitionism is rabidly anti-Cantor and Formalism staunchly pro-Cantor, even though both Formalism and Intuitionism are anti-Plato and Cantor is a diehard Platonist. Which, migrainous or not, means we're back to metaphysics: the modern wrangle over math's procedures is ultimately a dispute over the ontological status of math entities.

So while a thing in a finite time cannot come in contact with things quantitatively infinite, it can come in contact with things infinite in respect of divisibility: for in this sense the time itself is also infinite.

For the record, Parmenides' metaphysics-which is even wilder than the D.B.P's, and in retrospect seems more like Eastern religion than Western philosophy-is describable as a kind of static monism, and Zeno's paradoxes (of which there are really more than four) are accordingly directed against the reality of (1) plurality and (2) continuity. For present purposes we are concerned with (2), which for Zeno takes the form, as Russell mentions, of regular physical motion.

Specifically, Aristotle claims that no spatial extension (e.g. the intercurb interval AB) is 'actually infinite,' but that all such extensions are 'potentially infinite' in the sense of being infinitely divisible.

Like most religious mathematicians from Pythagoras to Godel, Bolzano believes that math is the Language of God and that profound metaphysical truths can be derived and proved mathematically.

The extreme mathematical weirdness of (infinity), which Galileo spends a lot of time in TNS giving examples of, is rather presciently attributed to epistemology instead of metaphysics. Paradoxes arise, according to G.G.'s mouthpiece, only when we attempt, with our finite minds, to discuss the infinite, assigning to it those properties which we give to the finite and limited.

but let's emphasize once more here that G. Cantor is, like R. Dedekind, a mathematical Platonist; i.e., he believes that both infinite sets and transfinite numbers really exist, as in metaphysically, and that they are reflected in actual real-world infinities.....

God exists necessarily and is the explanation why anything else exists.

6.41 Der Sinn der Welt muss ausserhalb ihrer liegen.