Metaphysics: Reality, Being, and Major Philosophical Systems
1. The Concept of Reality
A) Concept and Reality: Knowledge is considered the highest form of rational understanding. Scientific progress has shown that greater knowledge leads to greater certainty.
B) What Is Reality?: Ancient skeptics doubted whether anything could truly be known. Yet some things clearly exist, and the question is what their defining traits are.
C) Real and Ideal: There are things that exist and things that do not. For example:
- Concrete reality: things we can see and touch. Others are real but not tangible.
- Virtual reality: some things have no material existence but still form part of reality.
- Illusions: positive or negative, both are related to reality. Reality is not a source of deception.
D) Reality and the External World:
- Common-sense realism: the external world is perceived through the senses.
- Skepticism: the senses deceive us and make us see or hear things that are not there.
- Idealism: only our mind exists; the world is merely an idea.
- Phenomenalism: the real world is a set of sensations and perceptions that we can have.
For the question "What is real?", the object of metaphysics is the answer.
2. Reality as Metaphysics
A) Metaphysics as First Philosophy: Philosophy seeks to analyze all aspects of reality. Its object is the study of fundamental principles, including ontology, which originated with Aristotle.
B) Classical Metaphysics: A higher level of abstraction that describes the denominator of reality. It is transcendental and argumentative. Its second great principle is non-contradiction (something cannot both be and not be), and its third is the excluded middle (something is this or that, not both).
C) Current Metaphysics and Its Goals:
- Seeks its principles.
- Has a radical character.
- Pretends to universality: it analyzes reality to find meaning and overcomes differences.
- Considers reality as its fundamental reference: it seeks to explain meaning, reality, and existence.
3. Great Philosophical Systems
Metaphysics concretized in:
- Monism: reality is one substance.
- Pluralism: the nucleus of reality is composed of many elements.
- Cosmovisions: they seek to elaborate a general vision of reality and the world.
A) Plato: Plato thought there are two realities:
- Material: shows senses and changes.
- Objects of reason and mathematics: they do not change.
According to Plato, the true reality is the world of Ideas.
B) Aristotle: He carried out a complete synthesis of the knowledge of his time. He proposed the principle of reality, for which the essential reality is substance. He postulated the existence of a reference for change and movement: the immovable mover.
C) Thomas Aquinas: Very important. He explained reality through the necessity of postulating the existence of God as creator, and sought to combine faith and reason. He distinguished between God and creatures. To explain this, he proposed the difference between existence and essence: all beings have essence, but not all have existence. Existence is given by God the creator. To analyze it, one looks at creation.
4. Criticism of Great Systems
A) Kant: He sought to analyze the limits of reason and study which are the foundations of well-grounded rational knowledge. He affirmed that knowledge must be a combination of data from experience and understanding. The great ideas of metaphysics are illusions of reason, so metaphysics is not a science. Kant's work dismantled the ambitious pretensions of theoretical reason.
B) Marx: He thought that the fundamental reality is matter. The characteristics of Marx's critique are: only matter exists, it is transformed through human labor, and human relations have a new historical evolution.
C) Nietzsche: He criticized the contributions of Western metaphysics. He considered that metaphysics pretends to find a real and secure world. The history of metaphysics is the history of an immense error, which supposes undervaluing life and feelings.
D) Wittgenstein: He affirmed that philosophy should turn to the analysis of language. For philosophy, it is an attitude that analyzes and logically clarifies thoughts. Philosophy must clarify language so that problems are properly expressed. The only way to do metaphysics is to turn it into the analysis of language. It takes two forms:
- Revisionary metaphysics: revises traditional philosophical problems by criticizing their meaning.
- Descriptive metaphysics: describes the conceptual limits of our language.