CHAPTER 8

Metaphysics
What is existence?
Do numbers exist?
Does God exist?
Is God’s existence a necessary truth?
8.1 Introduction
This is the first chapter of this book whose title is a technical philosopher’s word. That
word—“metaphysics”—was first used as the name of a book by Aristotle, and what it means
takes a certain amount of explanation. But it’s important to say something about metaphysics
in any introduction to philosophy, because this subject is central to the Western philosophical
tradition.
The origin of the word “metaphysics” seems to have been this. The Greek adverb
“meta” can mean “beyond.” Aristotle had written a book called the Physics, which was about
what we would call “natural science.” Aristotle (or his students) called the book that followed
his Physics “the book beyond the Physics.” So, etymologically at least, metaphysics is the
subject that comes after natural science. But that, I fear, doesn’t tell you very much. Certainly
Aristotle did not think that he had invented the questions he was asking in the Metaphysics;
he quotes and discusses the arguments of many previous philosophers and poets. Still, much
of this discussion, especially at the start of the book, is about the elements of which material
things are made, and so it recapitulates some of the subject matter of the Physics. And,
indeed, since physics in Aristotle’s sense is the study of the natural world, it may seem to be
rather difficult to see what else there is to study “after” or “beyond” physics. What, after all,
is there except the natural world? Aristotle himself, in the second book of the Metaphysics
(whichmay originally have been intended to be a preface to the Physics), discusses some
concepts that we need before we can begin to think about the natural world at all, among
them the notion of a cause. In other places he discusses such concepts as element, nature,
necessity, unity, being, identity, potentiality, and truth, as well as many other concepts. Is
there something that these many topics have in common?
Well, in 4.13, in our discussion of causality, we noticed that in the sciences we try to
discover laws, generalizations that are true neither, at one extreme, just in the actual possible
world nor, at another extreme, in all the possible worlds, but rather in the class of nomically
possible worlds. The laws of physics aren’t necessary in the sense of true in every possible
world: the gravitational constant, g, could presumably have had a different value from the one
that it does, and then falling bodies would have accelerated faster or slower toward the Earth.
So, clearly, one possible subject matter that goes beyond natural science is what general
truths obtain not just in the nomically possible worlds—the worlds with the same natural laws
as the actual world—but in larger classes of worlds and, perhaps, in the end, in all of the
possible worlds. (I’m going to need to be able to talk about possible worlds where the laws of
nature don’t hold, so I’ll call them the “nomically impossible worlds.”)
 8.2 An example: the existence of numbers
We’ve already discussed one large group of propositions that are true in all the possible
worlds: they are the logical truths and all the other necessary truths. In 3.11, I pointed out
both that logical truths were necessary and that some necessary truths—“the Morning Star is
the Evening Star,” for example—are not logical truths. So there’s more to what is true in all
the possible worlds than just logic. Most philosophers think, for example, that the truths of
mathematics are necessary; but, despite serious attempts in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to prove that all mathematics was really logic, it is now widely agreed
among mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics that that is not so. Logicism, which
is the name for the position that tries to derive all mathematics from logic (plus definitions),
has not been successful. If mathematical truths are necessary, then since it’s true that