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Metaphysics is related to many fields of inquiry by investigating their basic concepts and relation to the fundamental structure of reality. For example, the natural sciences rely on concepts such as law of nature, causation, necessity, and spacetime to formulate their theories and predict or explain the outcomes of experiments. [131]
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy exploring the fundamental questions, including the nature of concepts like being, existence, and reality.Traditional metaphysics seeks to answer, in a "suitably abstract and fully general manner", the questions:
Metaphysics – traditional branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world that encompasses it, [1] although the term is not easily defined. [2] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms: [3] What is ultimately there or what if it was never there?
The question about why is there anything at all instead of nothing has been raised or commented on by philosophers including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, [22] Martin Heidegger, [23] and Ludwig Wittgenstein [24] – who called it the fundamental question of metaphysics. [25] The question is general, rather than concerning the existence of anything ...
This question has been written about by philosophers since at least the ancient Parmenides (c. 515 BC). [1] [2]"Why is there anything at all?" or "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question about the reason for basic existence which has been raised or commented on by a range of philosophers and physicists, including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, [3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, [4] and ...
A key topic in metaphysics concerns the question of whether reality only consists of physical things like matter and energy. Alternative suggestions are that mental entities (such as souls and experiences) and abstract entities (such as numbers) exist apart from physical things. Another topic in metaphysics concerns the problem of identity.
The "system building" style of metaphysics attempts to answer all the important questions in a coherent way, providing a complete picture of the world. The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle could be said to be early examples of comprehensive systems.
The problem of universals is an ancient question from metaphysics that has inspired a range of philosophical topics and disputes: "Should the properties an object has in common with other objects, such as color and shape, be considered to exist beyond those objects? And if a property exists separately from objects, what is the nature of that ...