Literary notes about metaphysics (AI summary)
The term "metaphysics" has been wielded in literature both as a prestigious, foundational science and as a subject of skeptical or even derisive commentary. In early philosophical treatises, authors like Kant and Hume used the word to designate a rigorous inquiry into the nature of knowledge and existence—for example, as a precondition for any future science ([1],[2],[3]) and as a central question in assessing human understanding ([4],[5],[6]). Conversely, metaphysics is sometimes portrayed as an abstruse or even spurious art, a domain too intricate for the uninitiated, as seen in Rousseau's suggestion that even grown men struggle with it ([7],[8]), and in critiques that dismiss its claims as fanciful or irrelevant ([9],[10]). Moreover, in certain literary works metaphysics is woven into broader aesthetic and moral debates, indicating its multifaceted role as both a serious academic discipline and a contested cultural construct ([11],[12]).
- This is what I hold myself justified in requiring for the possibility of metaphysics as a science.
— from Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant - Both sciences therefore stood in need of this inquiry, not for themselves, but for the sake of another science, metaphysics.
— from Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant - SOLUTION OF THE GENERAL QUESTION OF THE PROLEGOMENA, "HOW IS METAPHYSICS POSSIBLE AS A SCIENCE?" APPENDIX.
— from Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant - HOW IS METAPHYSICS IN GENERAL POSSIBLE?
— from Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant - HOW IS METAPHYSICS IN GENERAL POSSIBLE?
— from Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant - And thus I conclude the analytical solution of the main question which I had proposed: How is metaphysics in general possible?
— from Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Immanuel Kant - Shall I start the child upon this difficult question of metaphysics which grown men find so hard to understand?
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Women are no strangers to the art of thinking, but they should only skim the surface of logic and metaphysics.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - From that time he began to neglect his leather, and buried his brain under the rubbish of metaphysics.
— from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay - What dreary wastes of metaphysics!
— from The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon by Washington Irving - Here it is necessary to raise ourselves with a daring bound into a metaphysics of Art.
— from The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - The translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is his work.
— from Ecce Homo by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
