Jan-Anders said:
In my view, MOQ IS at the 5th level, because metaphysics is based "above", or
"outside" the intellectual level.
dmb says:
Metaphysics is above the intellectual level? Metaphysics is just a branch of
philosophy. It's the area of philosophy that deals with the most basic
questions like, "what is reality made of?" and "how can we have knowledge?".
Why do we need a whole other level of reality for that?
I'm guessing that you take "metaphysics" to mean something that it does not
mean. New Age spirituality, or something?
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says,
"The word ‘metaphysics’ is notoriously hard to define. Twentieth-century
coinages like ‘meta-language’ and ‘metaphilosophy’ encourage the impression
that metaphysics is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study devoted
to matters that transcend the mundane concerns of Newton and Einstein and
Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken. The word ‘metaphysics’ is derived from
a collective title of the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think
of as making up “Aristotle's Metaphysics.” Aristotle himself did not know the
word. (He had four names for the branch of philosophy that is the
subject-matter of Metaphysics: ‘first philosophy’, ‘first science’, ‘wisdom’,
and ‘theology’.) At least one hundred years after Aristotle's death, an editor
of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of Rhodes) entitled those fourteen
books “Ta meta ta phusika”—“the after the physicals” or “the ones after the
physical ones”—, the “physical ones” being the books contained in what we now
call Aristotle's Physics. The title was probably meant to warn students of
Aristotle's philosophy that they should attempt Metaphysics only after they had
mastered “the physical ones,” the books about nature or the natural world..."
Likewise, the Wikipedia article on "Metaphysics" says,
"The word "metaphysics" derives from the Greek words μετά (metá) ("beyond",
"upon" or "after") and φυσικά (physiká) ("physics"). It was first used as the
title for several of Aristotle's works, because they were usually anthologized
after the works on physics in complete editions. The prefix meta- ("beyond")
indicates that these works come "after" the chapters on physics. However,
Aristotle himself did not call the subject of these books "Metaphysics": he
referred to it as "first philosophy." The editor of Aristotle's works,
Andronicus of Rhodes, is thought to have placed the books on first philosophy
right after another work, Physics, and called them "the books that come after
the (books on) physics". This was misread by Latin scholiasts, who thought it
meant "the science of what is beyond the physical". However, once the name was
given, the commentators sought to find intrinsic reasons for its
appropriateness. For instance, it was understood to mean "the science of the
world beyond nature", that is, the science of the immaterial. Again, it was
understood to refer to the chronological or pedagogical order among our
philosophical studies, so that the "metaphysical sciences" would mean "those
that we study after having mastered the sciences that deal with the physical
world". There is a widespread use of the term in current popular literature,
which replicates this error, i.e. that metaphysical means spiritual
non-physical: thus, "metaphysical healing" means healing by means of remedies
that are not physical."
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
