have noticed lots of people saying things like metaphysics is

>>8391407
Some (severely uninformed) people like to think of metaphysics as a bygone relic of supernatural medieval thought, when it is quite clearly the opposite. Developments in science have made astrology and alchemy redundant, but metaphysical questions have not simply disappeared in the same way. I honestly cannot think of one metaphysical problem, traditional or otherwise, that has been solved by advances in physics or some other branch of science. I think it comes from some odd association people make between what was once known as natural philosophy and metaphysics.

>>8391407
see >>8388786

>>8391425
How was Kant uninformed ?

>>8391451
He wasn't uninformed. He didn't demonstrate that "doing" metaphysics is impossible, but established clear boundaries and methods in its practice. The synthetic a priori IS metaphysics.

Kant claimed you can't do metaphysics anymore, and then his immediate successors tried to do a kind of metaphysics, and then there was a significant departure from this and an avowed rejection of metaphysics in favour of a bunch of different philosophical focuses, like logic, philosophy of natural science (as directly opposed to metaphysics), human communication and intersubjectivity, and what you could broadly call existential philosophy, where the task of philosophy becomes evaluating the limits of human knowledge, choice, and experience of reality. None of these really concern themselves with metaphysics, except in a few cases arguably founding themselves in a metaphysical principle (usually a limiting one).

A few continued to do metaphysics, like Bergson and process philosophy and stuff, but it was mostly sidelined or glossed over. Now pure metaphysics is considered an extreme niche academically, with most professional philosophers concerned with some mishmash of the above list. You can still find various forms of spiritualists, mystics, transcendentalists, and religious people doing it though, especially religious ones who stick with the classic medieval arguments. Some of these guys are in the academy, often technically as historians or something similar. Also, modern Islamic philosophy rejects most Western Kant-y stuff and still roots itself in Plotinian mysticism and revelation, so there's more room there.

Two major blows to metaphysics in the modern era are the rise of science, which is simply satisfying as one possible answer to the question "what is the nature of reality?", the question that used to prompt people to pick up and continue the classic arguments that have been ongoing since Plato and before, but also the collapse (because of their inadequacy) of exactly those pre-Kantian conceptions and categories of metaphysics.

The treasure chest of metaphysical ideas just seems intuitively outdated now. It's very very hard for modern philosophy people, who live in towers of sophistication built precisely to show how that metaphysics was all just confusion over words and logic errors, to pick up Bonaventura and take him seriously. Bergson looks like a quaint throwback, and Bergson-esque arguments about the imperfection of reductivist physics don't concern people much beyond a very technical level. If you start talking metaphysics, you quickly "fall" into speculative physics, into provincialism (arguing about old arguments about the nature of universals), or into some kind of mystical axiom that most dudes won't accept. Mostly you'll just be mocked by smug finitude-fetishizing Frenchmen and logic-loving Englishmen who ONLY agree on one thing: That you're a dummy and metaphysics is astrology.

PS. Deleuze tried to do some kind of metaphysics and seems to like Bergson a lot but I'll be fucked if I know what he's about. I should check it out but I have this feeling it's just going to be shallowly appropriating metaphysical discourse.

>>8391463
how do you know so much

>>8391463
Good post

Please continue to post here

>>8391463

Is Kant himself not doing a sort of metaphysics? My basic understand of Kant's is that we can know that the universe (or, at least, our own minds) conform to certain properties (space, time, causation etc) because the nature of our experience could not be the way that it is without the presence of these properties. Is this not a metaphysical claim?

What's metaphysics?:(

>>8391407
They're associating different forms of groundless theorizing together to insult metaphysicians (usually old windbags) by comparing them to astrologists (usually dumb women).

>>8391463
dead serious: how do i attain this level of knowledge?