Metaphysics
Notes
Metaphysics asks what exists and what the nature of existing things is. It sits beneath science and ethics — the layer where foundational assumptions about reality are made explicit and contested.
Competing Theories of Reality
Ontological Theories surveys the major positions on what reality is ultimately made of: naturalism holds that everything is explicable through natural causes with no remainder; Platonic idealism holds that physical things are imperfect copies of abstract Forms; panpsychism holds that consciousness is not an emergent accident but a basic property of the universe; and reductionism holds that the properties of wholes are fully explicable through the properties of their parts. These positions are mutually incompatible, but each has a coherent internal logic.
The Limits of Objectivity
Nature and Limits of Knowledge addresses a second metaphysical question: even granting that reality exists independently of us, can we access it without distortion? Objectivism holds that seeing reality without subjective bias reduces distortion — but subjective perception mediates all experience, and the "view from nowhere" may be unavailable. The hard problem of consciousness compounds this: first-person experience resists third-person explanation even in principle.
Philosophers
Spinoza (philosopher) Pre-Socratic (philosopher) Immanuel Kant (philosopher) Hellenistic Age (philosopher) Bruno Latour (philosopher) Aristotle (philosopher)
Courses
History of New Philosophy (course)