Metaphysics Concepts
Fundamental concepts in metaphysics.
Fundamental concepts about what exists and how it is structured: ontology, causality, free will, determinism, identity and possible worlds, plus substance, universals, time, the mind-body problem, essence, personal identity, materialism, idealism and emergence.
Use it when
- You need a precise definition of a metaphysical term.
- You are following a debate about mind, time or causation.
Watch out for
- Each concept is the subject of competing theories; the definitions state the question, not its resolution.
- Metaphysical terms are used with different meanings across traditions and periods.
The data
16 rows
| Concept | Description |
|---|---|
| Ontology | Study of being and existence. |
| Causality | Relationship between cause and effect. |
| Free Will | Capacity to choose between alternatives. |
| Determinism | All events are determined by prior causes. |
| Identity | What makes an entity the same over time. |
| Possible Worlds | Framework for analyzing necessity and possibility. |
| Substance | What underlies and persists through the changes of a thing; classically, an entity that exists in its own right. |
| Universals and Particulars | Universals are properties that can be shared (redness); particulars are individual things. |
| Time | Debated between the A-theory (the present is special and time passes) and the B-theory (all times are equally real). |
| Mind-Body Problem | How mental states relate to physical states, with answers such as dualism, physicalism and idealism. |
| Essence and Accident | An essential property is one a thing cannot lose and remain what it is; an accidental one it can. |
| Personal Identity | What makes a person the same over time: body, memory, psychological continuity or something else. |
| Materialism | The view that everything that exists is physical or depends on the physical. |
| Idealism | The view that reality is fundamentally mental or dependent on mind. |
| Emergence | The idea that complex wholes have properties not found in their parts. |
| Modality | The study of necessity and possibility: what must be, what might be and what could have been. |
Fields
The shape of this dataset, read from the data itself: every column, its type and a real value. Agents can use this to plan a query without fetching the whole document.
| Section | Field | Type | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| data | concept | string | Ontology |
| data | description | string | Study of being and existence. |
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