Heidegger once delivered a famous lecture called "What Is Metaphysics." After he finished and a baffled silence a student raised his hand. "But Professor Heidegger," he asked, "what is metaphysics?" To which Heidegger responded, "That is a very good question." To this old wives tale I'd add the suggestion that the answer also changes, because "physics" changes.
Metaphysics is a very broad field, and metaphysicians attempt to answer questions about how the world is. Ontology is a related sub-field, partially within metaphysics, that answers questions of what things exist in the world. An ontology posits which entities exist in the world.
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the essence of things, of the fundamental nature of being and the world and the principles that organize the universe.
metaphysics philosophy-of-science philosophy-of-mathematics truth Improve this question edited at 1:07 Julius Hamilton
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Existence: I've never really seen this defined, and contemporary analytic metaphysics tends to make no distinction between existing and being. The Meinongians famously distinguished between different kinds of being, where some things with being might not exist.
Metaphysics can be understood as dealing with what is common in the (empirical) sciences in a generalizing manner. Whereas biology deals with objects like cells, physics with atoms, chemistry with elements and mathematics with sets or numbers, metaphysics asks what it means to be an object at all and discusses our limits in understanding objects in general. Whereas medicine is concerned with ...
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