/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6974009]

Why is metaphysics largely rejected today?
Isn't the grounds in which metaphysics is denied it itself a metaphysical position?

[Anonymous No.6974019]

>>6974009
You are correct
The answer is : people don't feel as it is a necessity.

[Anonymous No.6974020]

>>6974009
True, but also it's not as largely rejected in American and Britain as it perhaps had been 50-70 years ago.

Thomism has made a comeback, interest in Heidegger is stronger in America than in Germany, and Hegel has even made his way into the hearts of some analytics (albeit, with a correspondingly different understanding of his work).

[Anonymous No.6974035]

>>6974019
They don't find it useful so no one teaches it? Really?

When did we stop giving a fuck about wisdom?

[Anonymous No.6974041]

The sense of neutral apathetic dejection that permeates throughout our society prevents people from having an interest in pursuing such knowledge

[Anonymous No.6974045]

>>6974035
with the invention of the factory

[Anonymous No.6974053]

>>6974045
are you saying the industrial revolution or modernity did it? We got so interested in working and producing we lost one of the sciences?

[Anonymous No.6974073]

>>6974035
Modern society exists in a utilitarian state where knowledge must be ascribed a productive value in relation to the consumerist collective in order to be deemed "useful".

[Anonymous No.6974076]

>>6974035
IDK about you but I study and work in academia and outside of this domain, nobody gives a shit about wisdom.

[Anonymous No.6974084]

>>6974073
Why the fuck did we do that. That seems at best shortsighted, given what little knowledge we have application at the time.

Seriously, why did we change so wildly?

[Anonymous No.6974096]

>>6974084
Money became people's God, and all knowledge became a means to acquiring it as efficiently as possible.

[Anonymous No.6974100]

>>6974084
To kill Christianity and end the sectarian wars.
Seriously.

[Anonymous No.6974104]

>>6974084
money

[Anonymous No.6974107]

>>6974084
money, but worry not, soon money will become absurd and the existential anguish will strike everyone again, then something terrible will happen.

you can already witness the beginning of this in the narcissim that is injected in literally everyone

[Anonymous No.6974111]

three money answers and one end religious fighting answers
who has sources

[Anonymous No.6974118]

>>6974053
in so many words yes. although I think it's a little more sinister than a simple loss of interest

[Anonymous No.6974121]

Because wondering whether the world has 24 dimensions, or if you touch something are you really feeling it doesn't solve real problems like world hunger.
Inb4 some smartass goes off on >real, kids are still starving.

[Anonymous No.6974123]

>>6974096
this is unfair to say and you know it.

[Anonymous No.6974128]

>>6974121
Why are you pretending that you do nothing but think of the poor children with your little bleeding heart all day when you don't?

[Anonymous No.6974130]

>>6974084
Uhm theres something called Capitalism which has been going on for the last 200 years?

[Anonymous No.6974136]

>>6974096
"You have made out of Money, a god, and more than a god".

That's not Heidi, that's Aeschylus, 500 years before the birth of our favorite JC. Wisdom has always been the thing of priests and anally retentive thinkers-writers (as well as contemplative people in the general population, but those existed back then and exist now, they simply don't write treatises). You guys are spouting platitudes.

Also

>academia cares about wisdom

Please.
>>6974009
If anything our age is more metaphysical as ever, science is an outgrowth of metaphysics, as is industrial technology.

Somebody real smart should really write a principled and well-documented book about this. About how we're drowning in metaphysics, it's just happens to be shitty second-hand unassumed metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.6974143]

>>6974100
This would make sense, as it happened in the middle of the wars and the coming of modernity came along with a call for religious tolerance. And it's well known Hobbes was very agenda-driven. We dismissed final and formal causation unjustly and made "science" all about predictive power rather than gaining knowledge. Science became about "dominating nature" rather than understanding it.

It's likely the shift was made purely to kill sectarian fighting

[Anonymous No.6974145]

>>6974121
Who gives a shit about world hunger?

[Anonymous No.6974149]

>>6974045
Well said.

Industrial society did it in.

[Anonymous No.6974161]

>>6974136
Too bad Foucault got aids

[Anonymous No.6974182]

>>6974136
> About how we're drowning in metaphysics, it's just happens to be shitty second-hand unassumed metaphysics.
Massimo Pigliucci and others poke at a project like this with their critiques of New Atheism and Scientism. This critique could definitely be expanded to society as a whole I think; after all, these people and their beliefs have naturally come out of the ideology that already existed in our society

[Anonymous No.6974184]

>>6974143
oh come on man don't act like hobbes agenda invalidates his works

[Anonymous No.6974223]

>>6974121
And modern theoretical physics directly addresses world hunger how again?

Sometimes investigation is led for the sake of investigating and coming to know a thing, not what you can necessarily do with it. That's still true today.

[Anonymous No.6974245]

>>6974143
This is true, but partial, and Descartes and Bacon are just as responsible. The enlightenment project of "dominating nature" was angle by which the enlightenment philosophers tried to sell the public on philosophy and get it to slip by the church (since surely even the priests appreciate certain comforts, and the project even looks like it has the full backing of god right there in Genesis!). Of course, the project was successful beyond their wildest dreams, but now we have to deal with the fact that everyone's still clinging on to that idea of dominating nature, instead of simply being freed from the religious prejudices that were an impediment to speculative philosophy.

[Anonymous No.6974252]

>>6974245
>We dismissed final and formal causation unjustly
CITATION NEEDED.

[Anonymous No.6974263]

>thread about metaphysics
>marxists come in and shit up the place

[Anonymous No.6974282]

>>6974136
>Somebody real smart should really write a principled and well-documented book about this. About how we're drowning in metaphysics, it's just happens to be shitty second-hand unassumed metaphysics.

This is strange to me. For a massive length of time in our western history metaphysics was put as a science and yet now it's more associated with religious spirituality and New Age shit. Why the fuck? Did the focus on usefulness just make it be dropped as a science flat out?

[Anonymous No.6974350]

>>6974263
It's really just a guess on why there was a shift in interest in the sciences. Given the focus changed to "dominating nature" greed would be a likely answer

[Anonymous No.6974381]

The world has lost its magic and mystery to a great extent, I think.
Our world view is so encompassing(or at least we believe so), that there is no pressure to fight with it.

[Anonymous No.6974395]

I don't know what the continentals are doing, but metaphysics is dead among analyticals because it's not based in empirical knowledge.

[Anonymous No.6974408]

>>6974245
>>6974143
dominating nature was just an expression of Ockham's voluntarism and nominalism

[Anonymous No.6974462]

It seems to me like all successful metaphysical questions that have been answered we now call science. A prism makes rainbows because of refraction of light. Done deal.
The creepy thing has to do with the fact that people re-ask the same metaphysical questions that people have answered and get goofy or idiosyncratic (at best) answers that they publish and that then goes into the record books as 'metaphysics'.
As a demonstration of metaphysical thought - the twisting and turning over possibilities - it does not step wrong. It just comes to outlandish conclusions - usually speculative or difficult to verify - which makes these books on metaphysics what they are: largely trash - at least compared with rigorous science.

[Anonymous No.6974475]

As far as I can tell the nature of the study of metaphysics is the study of how we (as a human species, I'll deem The Studiers, aka students) interpret physical reality before students of physical reality begin to study it.

Metaphysics is the purest form of Romanticism, Continental philosophy, and the psychology of myths.

And it seems that with the absolute domination of Britain, mercantilism, and English pragmatism that we have established what is physical, so the question of asking "what is this reality?" Has been confused with asking "what is reality composed of?"

And with the magnamanious genius of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein in the 20th century coinciding with the unfortunate political capitulation of continental Europe (the rise of fascism in Germany, and by effect the subsequent demonization and implosion of German intellectual culture which carried the weight of the critique of Analytic philosophy) the total domination of a hyper a capitalistic, pseudo-imperialistic ideology was completely set.

And since Wittgenstein "solved" philosophy, philosophy itself became a trivial endeavor, and by extension academia became an institution of pragmatic learning, rather than an instition of pure learning where both progressive and conservative intellgenstia could have honest and rigorous dialogue and bounce essays, now academia is completely full of progressives who only speak in the echo chamber granted to them, rather than serving their societal function as the moral critique of the direction the material and physical society is going

[Anonymous No.6974536]

>>6974475
>And with the magnamanious genius of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein in the 20th century

[Anonymous No.6974669]

It's dead because people don't understand what it sets out to actually accomplish. Many equate it with spirituality and the new age movement when really it's anything but. Then there's the matter of physics and its arrogant claim to sole bearer of truth about fundamental physical reality. You'll find that many stemfags parrot the narrative that physics has eclipsed metaphysics when really they don't understand the complex relationship between the two disciplines and don't actually know that many eminent physicists dabbled in metaphysics and recognized how it related to their work. It's being squeezed by the twin terrors of scientism and new age spirituality, it's really sad.

[Anonymous No.6974747]

>>6974282
Because physics has grown in its ability to predict stuff and produce impressive results (in no small parts thanks to use of mathematics and better measurements methods) and as such "metaphysics" has come to be associated with "non-physical" and ultimately with "uneffectual" or even "irrelevant to material life". But this idea is still predicated on implicit dualism.

I think a good one-word answer woud be "specialization". Observable, predictable, reproductible results (with great accuracy) take up such a huge part of our lifes that any science dedicated to it is bound to be regarded as the gold standard of science. Now "science" is understood more narrowly, not as a field of knowledge, not even as a rational field of knowledge, but as a rational, systematized field of knowledge that deals hands-on with facts (and yes, this definition also applies to most social sciences as well). Mathematics isn't really a science by that definition, though it's an important scientific tool. Metaphysics isn't a science in that sense either, and it's not so much a tool as an underlying justification for the whole project.

>>6974350

It's more pride and curiosity than greed. Descartes (who explicitly talked about "making us master and owners of Nature") didn't think about making money, he just liked explaining shit and using that for conducing our lives. He would be pretty apalled at the way we satisfy (and create) our needs. A complete explanatoin would be very long, and it'd have to take into account change in access to materials, metallurgy, measurement, mathematics and economic systems as well as in the actual daily practice of science. But I suppose Kant's "reason is architectonic" (reason tries to explain everything as part of overarching systems that binds everything in a coherent whole) would be a good start.

>>6974462

How many books on metaphysics have you actually read ? Modern science exist because we chose certain answer over others to metaphysical questions (not only that, but it was a very needed step). Science is not a replacement for metaphysics, it's a practice operating on metaphysics' system.

The question of what physically causes rainbows is not a metaphysical one but precisely a physical one (your explanation is very incomplete btw, rainbow happen because of refraction *and* dispersion, and you haven't explained why there is refraction anyway). Seems like you jumped on the loose association between "metaphysics" and "new age bullshit" that was described above.

>>6974475
This is a 10/10 copypasta and I mean that in the meme sense. You could hardly fit in more meme without breaking the continuity of the post or becoming a transparent troll.

[Anonymous No.6974902]

>>6974184
any sophmore in philosophy could ruin Hobbes Theory of Knowledge

[Anonymous No.6974922]

>>6974747
>But this idea is still predicated on implicit dualism.
please explain

[Anonymous No.6975005]

meta physics is everything which lies over the physics, physics which is about experimental facts.

experiment physics = physics
theoretical physics and every other field relying on experimental facts = metaphysics

[Anonymous No.6975020]

>>6974922
The underlying idea is that there is "real/actual stuff" (the material) and "not real/actual stuff" (the spiritual) which implies a form of dichotomy between spirit and matter. It's not the dualism of Descartes, the point is not the same, but it's still a form of dualism.

But it's more a sloppy dualism (or a gut-feeling dualism perhaps, you feel that this metaphysics thing is "not real" though if asked to explain why you'd quickly run into contradictions) than anything else.

[Anonymous No.6975029]

>>6974035
No commie, but literally capitalism.

[Anonymous No.6975032]

Rejection of metaphysics can be traced to two grounds:

1)Hume influenced analytical philosophy which concerns itself with epistemology as an independent study.

and

2)Heideggerean fundamental ontology wherein the question concerning the ontological difference is formulated: i.e. What is Being and how is Being different from beings?

[Anonymous No.6975036]

>>6975020
What are examples of the "spiritual" in materialism then? With the focus on making everything reducible to material processes I don't see how we necessarily need a spiritual. Everything could be taken as material or abstract understanding of experiencing the material (feelings).

[Anonymous No.6975042]

Also, metaphysics (or at least metaphysics as it was critiqued in the past century) is really just the remnants of Aristotelian philosophy that at once clung to concepts like substance, mode, causality, actuality/possibility, etc. while trying to redefine them and move them to a radically new, post-Cartesian grounding.

[Anonymous No.6975058]

>>6975042
Mainly due to metaphysics being largely Aristotelian until modern times, where empiricism was the big thing and Aristotelian metaphysics either largely forgotten about or dismissed poorly.

We're still struggling with our rejection of Aristotle's metaphysics though. It's near impossible to describe evolution without final causes despite rejecting it and most realize that, which is why they use the rhetoric anyway and then struggle to define away final causality or, much more often, don't try to fix their logical inconsistency at all.