Understanding Knowledge and Metaphysics: Key Concepts

Possibilities of Knowledge

The most radical question presented by knowledge is your chance. Six types of response:

• Dogmatism: Expresses the naive attitude of those who are sure of knowing.
• Skepticism: Considers it impossible to obtain reliable knowledge, never accepting something as true. There are several types:
  1. Radical skepticism
  2. Moderate skepticism: This has two areas of human knowledge:
     • Statements expressing relations of ideas
     • Statements that express external issues and real existence
• Subjectivism and Relativism: Subjectivism finds that what is true depends on each subject. Relativism means recognizing something as true or false depends on the culture or time.
• Pragmatism: Identifies the true with the useful.
• Criticism: An intermediate position between dogmatism and skepticism. You can get real knowledge, but you have to do either of these two tasks:
  1. Make clear where our faculties of knowing can reach. Kantian critique: It suggests a critique of reason to find out where you can get to know.
  2. Try to critically compare our knowledge with reality. Critical Rationalism: All knowledge is fallible and must be tested.
• Perspectivism: Proposed by Jose Ortega y Gasset. Maintains that it can lead to knowledge of reality, but from different perspectives, because each generation has its own vision of reality.

Metaphysics

It's a knowledge that contains the following disciplines:

• Ontology: Is knowledge about being or reality in its utmost generality. Uses categories as concepts of intelligibility of being.
• Epistemology or Theory of Knowledge (Epistemology). It is a knowledge of reality and its foundations.
• Rational Theology: A study of God.

According to Professor Conill, Metaphysics is the knowledge that studies the fundamentals of reality, knowledge, and action. Therefore, categories emerged that allow us to understand reality. The categories have been understood in different ways:

1. Aristotle: The categories are the conditions of intelligibility of being. They are the substance and nine accidents. Total 10 categories.
2. Immanuel Kant: Defines the categories as pure concepts of understanding. This element is extracted from the pure universality and necessity of statements. Examples: substance, cause, necessity... Total 12 categories.

Names of Metaphysics: Metaphysics, ontology, first philosophy, science, and theological science that is always sought.