6.1  Metaphysics and Ontology

Originally, “metaphysics” was equivalent to “natural philosophy”, which addresses all kinds of scientific questions related to Nature. The term “science” originally means “knowledge”, but by the end of the 18th century, the modern scientific method transformed natural philosophy into an empirical activity deriving from experiment, unlike the rest of philosophy. Thereafter, metaphysics is taken to denote philosophical enquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence. While all fundamental theories of physics are based on some axioms or postulates, which are considered to be the end of all inquiries according to this theory, metaphysics goes beyond these postulates to explore what they mean as abstract human concepts.

However, some philosophers rejected metaphysics completely, because, as they claimed, it can’t be covered by mathematics. David Hume (1711-1776), in his Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, took such extreme position, and he called to burn those books of divinity and metaphysics because they do not contain any mathematical or experimental reasoning:

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. Hume (2004)

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), followed Hume in his rejecting of metaphysics, but he argued that there is still room for some synthetic knowledge, concerned with matters of fact yet obtainable independent of experience, such as the fundamental structures of space and time. Other Western philosophers argued that metaphysical states are neither true nor false, but meaningless, since, according to their verifiability theory of meaning, a statement is meaningful only if there can be empirical evidence for or against it.

Nevertheless, while early analytic philosophy, influenced by logical positivism, tended to reject metaphysics, the subject was revived in the second half of the 20th century, where some philosophers developed elaborate theories on a range of topics such as universals, causation, possibility and necessity.

After Quantum Mechanics, with the strange properties and weired behavior of microscopic particles that do not obey any normal logic or known concepts of physical objects treated in traditional philosophy, new metaphysical ideas were developed that challenged deterministic human logic. For example, do all theories of physics require the existence of space and time, or even objects? Do the objects have to retain their identity over time or do they change?

Ontology is one branch of metaphysics and highly hypothetical field of philosophy which deals with questions concerning the nature of being, becoming, existence or reality. It tries to answer the fundamental question: what is “thingness”?

Some realistic philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns refer to existent entities, while others argued that some nouns only provide a reference to a collection of either objects or events. In this latter view, instead of referring to entities, things are a collection of mental events experienced by a person and interpreted in the mind.

As we have already mentioned in chapter II, in his two-ways view of Nature, Parmenides described that our opinions about existence are often false and deceitful, because the reality of being is eternal oneness, while the perceived changes and multiplicity are illusory. This means that the phenomena of existence is what may be conceived of by consciousness, while its true reality is eternal, uniform, and immutable. According to this theory, everything that may be apprehended is but one aspect of a single unchanging eternal entity. Throughout the history of philosophy, this extreme metaphysical theory proved very difficult to grasp, but in the genuinely-complex time geometry this will be expressed mathematically in a simple world equation that describe how the entities of things are fixed in absolute flat three-dimensional space, while they appear to be changing in the outer level of time, as it will be elaborated further in section 8.4.

In contrast to this Eleatic school of monism, the pluralistic conception replaced the unique and unchanging reality of Being by a more fundamental and elementary ontic plurality of Becoming. This was stated in two different theories; the first dealt with “seeds” of the various substances, which Aristotle referred to as “homeomeries”, and the second was the atomistic theory, which dealt with reality as based on the atoms and their intrinsic movement in vacuum, as we introduced in chapter II.

Plato, on the other hand, developed his distinction between true reality and illusion, by arguing that what is real are eternal and unchanging Forms or Ideas, and their temporal images are the things experienced in sensation. In general, Plato presumes that all nouns refer to real entities, and he argues that Being is a Form in which all existent things participate.

Avicenna argued that being is either necessary, contingent (possible), or impossible. Necessary being is that which cannot but be, since its non-being entails a contradiction. The possible being is neither necessary nor impossible for it to be or not to be. It is ontologically neutral, and is brought from potential to actual existence via a cause that is external to its essence. The impossible, is that which necessarily does not exist, and the affirmation of its being is a logical contradiction, such as a circle with sharp corners. We have already showed in chapter IV that Ibn al-Arabi adopts these Avicennian categories, and extends them to establish his theory of the oneness of being that we introduced in section 1, and will discuss some of its metaphysical consequences in section 8.