The Nature of Reality

The meaning of the word “metaphysics” has changed over time, and it’s useful to consider the wide range of things it has meant. In the earliest days of philosophy, metaphysics was the part of philosophy that studied the original things in the universe, or the causes of those first things, or the things that aren’t affected by time. For instance, a religious or mythological story that suggests how the universe came into being might claim that there was a divine being that always existed and it, somehow, created the world. Metaphysically, that divine being would be an example of a thing that isn’t affected by time (since it always existed, and nothing came before it), and it would be an example of a cause of the first things (an example first thing might be the darkness that existed before there was light, according to some versions of these stories). Philosophers interested in these topics might ask questions about what these things were like. Is darkness a “thing”? What about light? What about the space that that light travels through? What about the speed of that light? What about the being that created the light? From a certain point of view, metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that tries to understand all the different ways that things might be real. Are some things eternal? Is duration itself a thing? Is it a property of a thing? If we define a day as lasting 24 hours, and an hour as lasting 60 minutes, are hours and minutes real things or are they just names for amounts of time? And, since we measure days, hours and minutes with numbers, what are numbers? Are numbers things? Are they the same kinds of things as hours and days? Are numbers more like words? Are numbers and words both ideas? What are ideas?

There are many metaphysical issues concerning philosophers today. In this short introduction to metaphysics, we will consider two: Mind and Will, and First Causes and Unchanging Things.