metaphysics

metaphysics The most ambitious of all philosophical projects is to devise a theory of the nature or structure of reality, or of the world as a whole. This project is commonly termed metaphysics, and its intellectual viability has been widely challenged in twentieth-century Western philosophy. Metaphysics flourished in classical Greece, and also in the context of scientific revolution in seventeenth-century Europe. Philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza thought that a systematic use of reason could lead them to a view of the nature of the world, which turned out to be very different in character from our ordinary, everyday understanding of it. But science, too, had this consequence. The philosophers Immanuel Kant and David Hume are the sources of modern scepticism about the pretentions of metaphysics. For both thinkers, significant use of language is possible only within the bounds of possible experience. Metaphysicians appear to make sense by using words drawn from everyday language, but in using these words to speak about a world beyond the limits of possible experience they fall into contradictions and incoherence. Some modern analytical philosophers have defended a more modest vision of metaphysics–‘descriptive’ as distinct from ‘speculative’, or ‘revisionary’–as the attempt to analyse and describe the framework of basic concepts and their relationships underlying everyday and scientific discourse.