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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Below is the article summary. For the full article, see metaphysics.
metaphysics, Branch of philosophy that studies the ultimate structure and constitution of reality—i.e., of that which is real, insofar as it is real. The term, which means literally “what comes after physics,” was used to refer to the treatise by Aristotle on what he himself called “first philosophy.” In the history of Western philosophy, metaphysics has been understood in various ways: as an inquiry into what basic categories of things there are (e.g., the mental and the physical); as the study of reality, as opposed to appearance; as the study of the world as a whole; and as a theory of first principles. Some basic problems in the history of metaphysics are the problem of universals—i.e., the problem of the nature of universals and their relation to so-called particulars; the existence of God; the mind-body problem; and the problem of the nature of material, or external, objects. Major types of metaphysical theory include Platonism, Aristotelianism, Thomism, Cartesianism (see also dualism), idealism, realism, and materialism.
Sir Michael A.E. Dummett was an English philosopher who did influential work in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the history of analytic philosophy. He was also one of the foremost expositors of the work of the German mathematical logician Gottlob
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher whose critique of Western philosophy and analyses of the nature of language, writing, and meaning were highly controversial yet immensely influential in much of the intellectual world in the late 20th century. Derrida was born to Sephardic Jewish parents in
Nicolas Malebranche was a French Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and major philosopher of Cartesianism, the school of philosophy arising from the work of René Descartes. His philosophy sought to synthesize Cartesianism with the thought of St. Augustine and with Neoplatonism. Malebranche, the
Hylomorphism, (from Greek hylē, “matter”; morphē, “form”), in philosophy, metaphysical view according to which every natural body consists of two intrinsic principles, one potential, namely, primary matter, and one actual, namely, substantial form. It was the central doctrine of Aristotle’s
