Metaphysics

“I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

“If only these metaphysicians would give their attention to the lengthy discursive processes which lead science to build new intuitions.”

“There are metaphysical problems, which cannot be disposed of by declaring them meaningless. For, as I have repeatedly said, they are "beyond physics" indeed and demand an act of faith. We have to accept this fact to be honest. There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that "belief" must be discarded and replaced by "the scientific method."”

“The only way to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing.”

“The objective world of science has nothing in common with the world of things-in-themselves of the metaphysician. The metaphysical world, assuming that it has any meaning at all, is irrelevant to science.”

“the search for necessary truths, truths that are not only true, but they couldn't have been false. \xa0”

“The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.”

“In an ideal university the student would not proceed from the most recent observations back to the first principles, but from the first principles to whatever recent observations we claim significant in understanding them. ...The natural sciences derive their principles from the philosophy of nature which, in turn, depends on metaphysics. ...Metaphysics, the study of the first principles, pervades the whole. Dependent on it and subordinate to it are the social and natural sciences.”

“Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. ... Whenever the Westerner hears the word “psychological,” it always sounds to him like “only psychological.””

“The only way to avoid metaphysics is to avoid thinking.”

“It has been asserted that metaphysical speculation is a thing of the past and that physical science has extirpated it. The discussion of the categories of existence, however, does not appear to be in danger of coming to an end in our time, and the exercise of speculation continues as fascinating to every fresh mind as it was in the days of Thales.”

“All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.”

“Find a scientific man who proposes to get along without any metaphysics […] and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with which they are packed. We must philosophize, said the great naturalist Aristotle — if only to avoid philosophizing.”

“Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.”