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gjm comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Can anybody give me a good description of the term "metaphysical" or "metaphysics" in a way that is likely to stick in my head and be applicable to future contemplations and conversations? I have tried to read a few definitions and descriptions, but I've never been able to really grok any of them and even when I thought I had a working definition it slipped out of my head when I tried to use it later. Right now its default function in my brain is, when uttered, to raise a flag that signifies "I can't tell if this person is speaking at a level significantly above my comprehension or is just spouting bullshit, but either way I'm not likely to make sense of what they're saying" and therefore tends to just kind of kill the mental process that that was trying to follow what somebody was saying to me / what I was reading.
Given how often it comes up, and often from people I respect, I'm pretty sure that's not the correct behavior Figured it's worth asking here. In case it wasn't obvious, I have virtually no background in philosophy (though I've been looking to change that).
This is in no way an answer to your actual question (Anatoly's is good) but it might amuse you.
"Meta" in Greek means something like "after" (but also "beside", "among", and various other things). So there is a
Common misapprehension: metaphysics is so called because it goes beyond physics -- it's mode abstract, more subtle, more elevated, more fundamental, etc.
This turns out not to be quite where the word comes from, so there is a
Common response": actually, it's all because Aristotle wrote a book called "Physics" and another, for which he left no title, that was commonly shelved after the "Physics" -- *meta ta Phusika -- and was commonly called the "Metaphysics". And the topics treated in that book came to be called by that name. So the "meta" in the name really has nothing at all to do with the relationship between the subjects.
But actually it's a bit more complicated than that; here's the
Truth (so far as I understand it): indeed Aristotle wrote those books, and indeed the "Metaphysics" is concerned with, well, metaphysics, and indeed the "Metaphysics" is called that because it comes "after the Physics". But the earliest sources we have suggest that the reason why the Metaphysics came after the Physics is that Aristotle thought it was important for physics to be taught first. So actually it's not far off to say that metaphysics is so called because it goes beyond physics, at least in the sense of being a more advanced topic (in Aristotle's time).