Quotes About Metaphysics

One should no more rack one's brain about the problem of whether something one cannot know anything about exists all the same, than about the ancient problem of how many angels are able to sit on the point of a needle.

In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.

To separate between religion and metaphysics, however often it may have been attempted, is impossible

If history is to be truly history, if it is to realize values, universally valid values, we cannot know this from the facts in themselves, but we borrow this conviction from philosophy, from our view of life and of the world — that is to say, from our faith. Just as there is no physics without metaphysics, there is no history without philosophy, without religion and ethics.

One arrives at metaphysics, at a philosophy of religion, only if from another source one has gained the certainty that religion is not just an interesting phenomenon—comparable to belief in witches and ghosts—but truth, the truth that God exists, reveals himself, and is knowable.

In the same way, any ethical system which aspires to be true ethics and to bear a normative and teleological character, not falling into merely a description of habits and customs, is forced to seek the support of metaphysics.

By banishing metaphysics, materialism has no longer an ethical system, knows no longer the distinction between good and evil, possesses no moral law, no duty, no virtue, and no highest good.

Metaphysics, the belief in the absolute as a holy power, always forms the foundation of ethics.

Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science has put us in the position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position-and no end to it is in sight-is that of having to philosophise without 'foundations'.

Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.

The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.

This strikes at the very roots of Western metaphysics, because it's the claim to full presence which underpins metaphysical concepts and procedures.

I'm a humanist. I'm an observer. I have a very scientific mind. I believe metaphysics and science absolutely blended are more the truth for me. It doesn't work just believing in what somebody says.

The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.'

I don't pretend to be an astrophysicist or anything, even though I do read about certain things like metaphysics and cosmology that I've always just been really interested in. I don't pretend to be able to sit down and pontificate on any of these subjects.

However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.

Substance must itself be said of the modes and only of the modes.

God should not be called an individual substance, since the principal of individuation is matter.

I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance in general.

But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.

The question of purpose and meaning becomes obsolete when you think beyond human life.

Scientific investigation, narrowly conceived, does not prove materialism. Rather, materialism arises from confusing two distinct moves: (1) the narrow scientific strategy of focusing on what is material and (2) the claim that the narrow focus is all that there is.

The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent.

Nothing could be more irrational than the idea that something comes from nothing.