Quotes About Metaphysics

Heidegger says that "the fundamental question of metaphysics" is "why is there anything at all rather than nothing?" The fundamental question is not, as Plato thought, "what" a thing is (every Platonic dialogue is about that, about an essence, a definition, a concept, such as justice or piety or learning) but why it exists, why anything exists. Plato never asked that ultimate question. And the answer is God.

The quantity comes from the efficient cause but the quality comes from the formal cause.

Morality flows from metaphysics because goodness flows from God.

From Socrates through Aquinas, reason meant primarily the understanding of the nature of reality, the knowledge of the essences of things.

All that exists is metaphysically true and metaphysically good.

The soul is the form of the body and the body is the matter of the soul, somewhat as the meaning of a book is its form or soul and the words are its matter or body.

The distinction between the natural and the supernatural is a distinction between two abstract aspects, not two concrete things.

Aristotle also believed that a vacuum was impossible.

then lung-gom may be simplistically regarded as a manifestation of mind over matter, of matter returning to energy

Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–c. 1525)

in Parsifal: You see, my son, here time turns into space.

In other words, an entire new world is pointed to, by this. The name for it is neither art, for it has no form, nor religion. What is it? I have pondered this pin unceasingly, yet cannot fathom it. We evidently lack the work for an object like this. So you are right, Robert. It is authentically a new thing on the face of the world

Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states.

Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything's pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.

?i sfinÈ›ii sau înÈ›elepÈ›ii de odinioar?, È™i cercet?torii de azi ai fenomenelor metapsihice, toÈ›i cei care au meditat asupra sufletului È™i-au manifestat în general respectul pentru cel al fiinÈ›ei umane È™i au desconsiderat celelalte animale È™i plantele. De mii de ani înaint?m orbeÈ™te doar în direcÈ›ia c?ut?rii diferenÈ›elor de tot felul dintre om È™i lumea natural?.

Quite a few of these know nothing about quantum mechanics; others understand the physics but put a highly tendentious spin on it. A good corrective for these is Victor J. Stenger's The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995

Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.

If we take seriously the idea that all objects recede interminably into themselves, then human perception becomes just one among many ways that objects might relate. To put things at the center of a new metaphysics also requires us to admit that they do not exist just for us. The Computer

Platonist view of mathematical ideas: that mathematical truths 'really' exist, but they do so in an ideal form in some sort of parallel reality, which has always existed and always will.

As Ibn Arabi says: 'Absolute existence is the source of all existence'.

if the Now moves, it must move with respect to time. But the Now is time. So is it moving with respect to itself? No, says Williams, that doesn't make sense. If it's moving, it must be moving with respect to a second time – the second one being the time with respect to which the first one moves. Tensers

There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians.... Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods?

I study myself more than any other subject; it is my metaphysic, it is my physic.

I study myself more than any other subject; it is my metaphysic, and my physic.