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1. From the time of Thales in the 500s BC to Kant around 1800, metaphysics was one of the three great preoccupations of philosophy. There was of course ethics -- very practical most of the time. Then there was epistemology -- very foundational.
Then there was metaphysics, the question of what is real.
I'll go through a brief history of "Western" metaphysics in the next section. Let's just say that a lot of that story seems like a lot of made up stuff. With the dawn of the scientific age, the conversation changed substantially to things like atoms and particles.
But before Kant around 1800, the conversation largely wavered between matter and ideas as the ultimate basis of reality. We've already had this conversation in the last section. We talked about the long standing debate over whether our minds or our experiences were the surest path to knowledge.
That debate of the rationalists versus the empiricists maps to some degree to the core debate of metaphysics -- are ideas most real, or is matter most real? The rationalists leaned toward ideas, and the empiricists leaned toward matter. [1]
In the previous unit, we learned that Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) broke this tie. He suggested that the content of our thinking came through our senses, but the organization of that content was a matter of our minds. We thus do not know the world as it is (das Ding an sich). We only know it as our minds process that input from our senses.
2. That moment was one of the biggest turning points in the history of philosophy. It was not a point of skepticism for Kant because he believed God guaranteed the general truthfulness of the way our minds process the world. But he nevertheless thought it implied that we only know the world as it appears to us, not as it actually is.
This conclusion led him to write, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic. It is basically a warning -- it puts a real damper on classical metaphysics when we stipulate that you can't actually know the answers to such questions about what is real.
Accordingly, metaphysics has fallen on somewhat hard times these last two centuries. There have remained those who have continued either as idealists (Hegel) or materialists (Marx). But the key question has much more shifted to what we can know for certain at all and whether we can speak of reality at all.
In a couple sections, I'll put in a word for a version of critical realism. It goes hand in hand with the "pragmatic epistemology" I suggested at the end of Unit 7. Critical realism holds that the world I experience (which can include the spiritual realm) is real. However, my apprehension of that world is always limited by the finitude of my understanding and my fallen potential to misapprehend it.
Similarly, as we have argued, my organization of the world involves paradigms and pictures. Some paradigms and pictures "work" better than others.
[1] As we saw back in 7.3 and will see again in the next section, George Berkeley (1685-1753) was the big exception. He saw our senses as the truest path to truth, and he believed that ideas were the most real thing.___________________________
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
2.1 The Structure of Thinking?
2.2 Three Tests for Truth
3.1 Faith and Reason
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology
