WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, and related to the natural sciences, like physics, psychology and the biology of the brain; and also to mysticism and religious and spiritual subjects. It is notoriously difficult to define, but for purposes of briefly introducing it to nonphilosophers, it can be identified as the study of any of the most fundamental concepts and beliefs about the basic nature of reality, on which many other concepts and beliefs rest — concepts such as being, existence, universal, property, relation, causation, space, time, event, and many others. Part of the trouble with defining metaphysics lies in how much the field has changed since it first received its name by Aristotle’s editors centuries ago (see below). Problems that were not originally considered metaphysical have been added to metaphysics. Other problems that were considered metaphysical problems for centuries are now typically relegated to their own separate subheadings in philosophy, such as philosop
The philosophical study whose object is to determine the real nature of thingsto determine the meaning, structure, and principles of whatever is insofar as it is. Modern British and American philosophers commonly describe themselves as engaged in philosophical analysis, as opposed to metaphysics. The interests of a metaphysician, according to this view, are predominantly speculative; he wants to reveal hitherto unknown facts about the world and on that basis to construct a theory about the world as a whole. Rational psychology is a metaphysical discipline that attempted to determine the nature of the human soul by a priori reasoning. In Christian Wolff’s division of metaphysics, rational psychology was one of three disciplines included under the heading of special metaphysics (the others being rational cosmology and rational theology). Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, criticized the pretensions of rational psychology.
