What is a metaphysical truth? What makes it metaphysical? Dear Alex Blum, I'll try to answer:
asking/talking about metaphysics – in my perception - is a prime example for what is typical to philosophical dialogue, viz., eliminating questionable presuppositions before trying to answer. I'd like to summarize my personal answer to this topic (at some length but below 500 words :-) ) as follows: - The use of the epistemological labels 'true', 'false' for metaphysical statements is -in my perception - inadequate, for suggesting an epistemic situation for metaphysical research, it does not reside in.
- Take Immanuel Kant's CPR seriously, as to that metaphysics is not possible as an exact science (like theoretical physics or pure mathematics). But it does not follow, that metaphysical research in some less ambitious way were not possible.
- Next, metaphysics is not the science of a separate world different from the world as viewed by science or as perceived or else experienced in every day life, profession and industry. In the opposite. Metaphysics is just about this one world, we inhabit, work on, reason about, … , while looking at it from other points of view.
- There are basically at least two cognitive points of metaphysical view, and else perhaps equally legitimate non-cognitive view points in terms of ethical value, aesthetic respect, religious worship, … confine here to the cognitive ones:
- The perhaps most discussed cognitive viewpoint concerns the implicit assumptions about population and/or structure of the world, scientific theories carry with them, which vary with history of science (-> Collingwood). Examples are, the logical structure of scientific theories (including e.g. Ramsay sentences, indiscernibles, … ), the nature of physical space (in the time of Descartes,Leibniz, Newton), or physical conservation laws (mostly in a later time in the history of physics)
- Another equally important cognitive view point, not really covered by Kant but by his (e.g. german idealist) successors concerns the fact, that despite the (by CPR part I doctrine) indirectness of scientific access to the world, we are (intelligent) part(s) of this one world ('Ding an sich','substance','universe', …), have thus too some (!) direct cognitive access to the world, this cognitive relation given by introspection as well as indirectly by practice of different kinds (emotions, intentions, will, technical and industrial practice, social and economical interactions, … )
[My recent rather special article on Spinoza's metaphysics in E1 (see e.g. @philpapers) reflects in some way these general cognitive view points. ]
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Friedrich Grafe
Wendelstein
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Original Message:
Sent: 11-06-2020 04:34
From: Alex Blum
Subject: Metaphysical Truth
What is a metaphysical truth? What makes it metaphysical? |
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