Metaphysics asks: what is the world made of, at the deepest level? Not what particular things exist (that’s a job for science) but what kind of thing reality is. Is the world fundamentally made of matter? Of mind? Of processes? Of relations? When a physicist describes subatomic particles, metaphysics asks what it means for those particles to be — what assumptions about reality the physicist is already making before the first measurement.
The name is an accident of library science. Aristotle wrote a treatise on first principles, and his editors shelved it after (meta) his treatise on nature (physica). The label stuck. But the questions it names are not accidental: they’re the questions that every other discipline takes for granted. Physics assumes that there’s a physical world; biology assumes that living things are a real category; mathematics assumes that its objects are in some sense there. Metaphysics examines those assumptions.
Two recurring debates structure the field. Monism holds that reality is made of one fundamental kind of stuff — whether that’s matter (materialist monism), mind (idealist monism), or some neutral substrate. Pluralism holds that there are multiple irreducible kinds. The other debate concerns what that stuff does: substance metaphysics says reality is made of things that persist through change, while process metaphysics (developed by Alfred North Whitehead and others) says reality is made of events and becomings — that change is more fundamental than what changes.
The relationality project developed in this vault is a metaphysical framework. It makes a specific claim about the fundamental nature of reality: that relations are ontologically prior to the things they relate. This isn’t a claim about how people should think about reality; it’s a claim about what reality is. That makes it metaphysics — and it means the formal mathematics in the semiotic universe isn’t just a model. It’s an articulation of metaphysical structure.
Related terms
- Ontology — the subfield of metaphysics concerned with what exists and the categories of being
- Materialism — the metaphysical position that the physical world is fundamental
- Phenomenology — the study of experience, which asks what reality looks like before metaphysical theories are applied
- Relational Ontology — the metaphysical position that relations are prior to entities
- Dialectics — a method that makes metaphysical claims about the structure of change
- Process philosophy — the tradition that takes becoming, not being, as fundamental