What There Is

Eight steps into the first question of metaphysics: what is there, and what is it?

A course on the thought of Metaphysics.

What you will learn

  • State what metaphysics studies (being qua being) and how it differs from physics or mathematics.
  • See that 'is' / 'being' is said in several senses — the founding move of the whole inquiry.
  • Grasp metaphysics as category theory: an inventory of the most general kinds of being.
  • Distinguish a particular (this individual) from the properties it bears.
  • See the subject–predicate structure of how we describe a thing, and the metaphysical question it raises.
  • Pose the problem the next module answers: is there a bearer beneath the properties, or not?
  • State the bundle theory and the substratum theory, each at its strongest.
  • Run the two classic objections: the bare/featureless substratum, and the identity of indiscernibles.

Course outline

  1. The Question Itself — What metaphysics even is — the study of being as such — and why it is the first of the sciences. Appearance versus reality; metaphysics as the theory of the most general kinds of being.
  2. What Is a Table? — The Thing and Its Qualities — The concrete particular. A single ordinary object turns out to be a 'this-something' that HAS properties — which raises the question of what, underneath the properties, does the having.
  3. A Thing, or a Bundle? — Substratum vs Bundle — The two answers to 'what is a concrete thing': a bare substratum bearing properties, or a bundle that IS its properties. The identity-of- indiscernibles objection, the 'bare bearer' objection, and…
  4. What Is a Circle? — The One Over the Many — The problem of universals. Many things are round, many are just; what do they share? Plato's bold answer — the separate Form — presented at full strength, as the most natural first answer to 'the one…
  5. Universals in Things — Aristotle's Answer — Immanent realism: the universal is real but exists IN its particulars, not apart. Exemplification, the recovery of science and abstract reference without a separate world, and the price the view pays.
  6. Are There Only Particulars? — The Nominalist's Razor — Nominalism: the denial of universals. Its motivation (ontological economy), its main strategies (austere, metalinguistic, trope, fictionalist), and how each tries to pay for sameness with particulars…
  7. Are Wholes Just Sums of Parts? — Composition and mereology. When do parts make a whole, and is the whole anything over and above them? Aristotle's answer — the form is what makes many parts ONE thing — against both 'a whole is…
  8. The Table of Being — What Kinds of Thing Are There? — Capstone. From the single thing to the whole inventory: the categories of being, with substance as primary and the rest as ways substances are. What the student now holds, and how it founds…

Works read in this course

  • Categories — the ten kinds of being; primary substance vs the rest
  • Metaphysics — first philosophy: being qua being, substance, form & matter, the whole
  • Physics — nature, the this-something, matter and form in change
  • Plato, Republic & Phaedo — the theory of separate Forms, presented and contested
  • Hume, Treatise I; Locke, Essay II — the bundle / substratum debate, brought forward
  • Quine, 'On What There Is' — the nominalist's economy of being

Terms introduced

metaphysics, ousia, substratum, bundle theory, universal, particular, Form (Plato), exemplification, nominalism, trope, mereology, category, identity of indiscernibles

Part of the Simposeum course library.