Is metaphysics dead?

Posted by Robert Sharp Nov 25, 2006

Day one of intro to philosophy: "There are three major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics." This is the trinity of philosophy, three branches of what it means to do philosophy. Metaphysics, of course, is the study of being, of what exists or where we came from. For various reasons, those questions have either been dropped altogether or left to science. A few philosophers still do metaphysics, but if you google 'metaphysics,' much of what you will find will be psychics and astrologers, not philosophers. Why did this happen? What does it mean for philosophy?

In the beginning of philosophy, a man named Thales of Miletus worked principly on metaphysics. He believed that water was the basic substance of the universe, an idea that makes sense when you consider that water appears in three states and is necessary for life. We have no epistemic or ethical views from Thales. Perhaps he did such work, but we don't know about it. In any case, many of the philosophers that appeared before Socrates were metaphysicians first and foremost. Even after Socrates, philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Kant all focused on metaphysics as the starting point of their work. It was seen as basic, as the explanation of starting assumptions that were necessary for beginning any philosophical work. Descartes presented metaphysics as the root of the tree of knowledge (not to be confused with the one in Genesis!). Without metaphysics, we could not trust our sciences or any other supposed knowledge.

Despite this strong tradition in philosophy, metaphysics began to fall out of favor with the so-called postmodernists and existentialists. Nietzsche presented metaphysics as a lie that people told to support their philosophical positions. No metaphysical claims could be proven. They were all speculation, horribly biased by the ends to which the metaphysical views were aimed. So Descartes assumes God in order to complete his Meditations. Kant assumes a certain view of human nature in order to support his view that reason is the central ethical tool of humanity. Nietzsche's criticisms were added to by Wittgenstein, who was not an existentialist. Wittgenstein's approach was to say that language dictated our metaphysical views. Language games were formed by societies (large and small, with subgroups within them), and our views were shaped by the games in which we partook. In this conception, metaphysics is the result of language, not its foundation.

All of these attacks (and there are many more) led to one basic conclusion amongst philosophers: metaphysics was dead. There was no point in asking questions that could not be answered without speculating on things that happened before humans were even around. For many philosophers, such questions are wrong-headed from the start because they assume that there IS a world beyond this one, that there is more than we see, more than we create. If humanity is self-creating (as existentialism suggests) or if metaphysics is based on language (as Wittgenstein suggests), then metaphysics is more of a psychological or anthropological point than a philosophical one.

Thus philosophy lost one if its big three areas, a loss that is still not fully comprehended by much of the community. We aren't yet sure what lasting effect this might have on philosophy.