What "metaphysics" means

What it is

"Metaphysics" names two things that have very little to do with each other.

The first is a branch of academic philosophy. It asks what exists and what it is like to exist: whether there are such things as properties as well as things that have them, whether causation is real or just regularity, what makes you the same person you were at six, whether time passes or merely appears to, whether the future is open. It is technical, argumentative work, and most of the people doing it professionally have no interest whatsoever in crystals.

The second is the popular sense — the one on the sign above a shop selling tarot decks, incense and rose quartz, and the one meant by a "metaphysical fair". Here the word covers roughly everything held to be real but not physically measurable: energy, spirit, the soul, psychic ability, astrological influence, past lives.

This site is about the second sense and tries to think with the first. That distinction is the whole reason this article is the first one published.

Where it came from

The word is an accident of cataloguing.

Aristotle wrote a set of works on what he called "first philosophy" — the study of being qua being, being considered simply as being rather than as a rock or a horse or a number. He never gave the collection the name it now carries. The traditional account is that when his works were organised into an edition some centuries later, these books were placed after the ones on natural science, the Physics, and were referred to as ta meta ta physika — "the ones after the Physics". A filing position became a title.

That account is usually credited to Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century BC. It is plausible and it is the standard story, but the evidence is late and thin, and historians of philosophy treat the details as uncertain rather than established.

What matters more is what happened next. The Greek meta can mean "after", but it can also mean "beyond". Once the title existed, later readers — medieval and then early modern — increasingly heard it in the second sense: the science of what lies beyond the physical. That reading is a folk etymology of a shelf label, and it is where the popular meaning of the word was born.

By the nineteenth century in America, that sense had hardened into a religious identity. The New Thought movement and the loose current around it described themselves as metaphysical religion, meaning a practical spirituality of mind, healing and correspondence rather than of church and creed. The historian Catherine Albanese traces this strand as a continuous and serious part of American religious history rather than a fringe of it — and it is the direct ancestor of the metaphysical shop on the high street today.

How it is used

In a philosophy department, "metaphysics" appears on a syllabus next to epistemology and logic, and a metaphysician is someone who might spend a career on the problem of universals.

In a bookshop, "metaphysical" is a shelf between self-help and religion.

Both usages are legitimate — words are allowed to mean what their communities use them to mean. The trouble only starts when the two get quietly swapped. It happens in both directions, and both are worth watching for:

• Borrowing the academic sense to lend authority to the popular one: describing a claim about crystal energy as "metaphysics" in a way that implies philosophers endorse it. They do not, and mostly have never considered it.
• Borrowing the popular sense to dismiss the academic one: treating serious work on causation or personal identity as though it were the same activity as reading auras.

What we can and cannot say

We can say with confidence that the two senses are historically connected but philosophically separate, and that the connection runs through a mistranslation of a cataloguing convention rather than through any shared method.

We can say that academic metaphysics is a live and rigorous field, and that its existence lends no support at all to any particular popular metaphysical claim.

We cannot say that the popular sense is therefore empty or unserious. It describes a real and large body of human practice with a documented history, which is what the rest of this site is for. What we can say is that calling something "metaphysical" tells you where it sits in a bookshop. It tells you nothing whatever about whether it is true.

Further reading

• Aristotle, Metaphysics — the source text. Book IV is the usual entry point for the "being qua being" project.
• Peter van Inwagen, "Metaphysics", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — a free, careful survey of what the academic discipline actually covers and how hard it is to define.
• Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (2007) — the standard scholarly history of the popular sense.