Metaphysics

Evolutionism, in basing itself upon the notion of progress, which is change from the worse to the better, allows the notion of time, as it seems to me, to become its tyrant rather than its servant, and thereby loses that impartiality of contemplation, which is the source of all that is best in philosophic thought and feeling.

Metaphysicians, as we saw, have frequently denied altogether the reality of time.

I do not wish to do this.

I wish only to preserve the mental outlook which inspired the denial.

Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind, and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Recording by Landon D.C. Alkind at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa.

Mathematics and the Metaphysicians.

The nineteenth century, which prided itself upon the invention of steam and evolution, might have derived a more legitimate title to fame from the discovery of pure mathematics.

Schopenhauer's Ethics In the previous video we talked about how Schopenhauer builds an entire metaphysical system, taking both Kant and our own bodies as a starting point.

We discussed how, in Schopenhauer's Metaphysics, the world appears to us as both will and representation.

We also saw how Schopenhauer concluded that the world as will must be undivided in space and time.

In other words, he showed how the world is one.

Long ago, Christian Wolff in his Philosophia Practica, Part 2, Subsection 28, observed, Tenebrae in philosophia practica non dispaluntur nisi luce metaphysica fulgente.

Translation: Darkness in practical philosophy is only dispersed when the light of metaphysics shines on it.

And Kant, in the preface to his Grundlegungs über Metaphysik der Sitten, remarks, Metaphysics must precede, and is in every case indispensable to, moral philosophy.

For, just as every religion on earth, so far as it prescribes morality, does not leave the latter to rest on itself, but backs it by a body of dogmas, the chief end of which is precisely to be the prop of the moral sense, so with philosophy the ethical basis, whatever it be, must itself attach to and find its support in one system of metaphysics or another, that is to say, in a presupposed explanation of the world and of existence in general.

This is so, because the ultimate and true conclusion concerning the essential nature of the universe must necessarily be closely connected with that touching the ethical significance of human action, and because, in any case, that which is presented as the foundation of morality, if it is not to be merely an abstract formula floating in the clouds and out of contact with the real world, must be some fact or other discoverable either in the objective cosmos or else in man's consciousness.