On Metaphysics

The term "Metaphysics" (ta meta ta physika) was introduced by Andronicus of Rhodes to classify a collection of texts of the Corpus Aristotelicum that concerned those matters that did not have place in the books of Physics.

Metaphysics refers to the branch of philosophy that studies the first causes, principles and origins of all things. Causes, determinations, reasons and respective foundations are approached within Metaphysics.

As the science of the first causes, principles and origins of all existing things, Metaphysics is an archeology (arche). As science of the being as being it is an ontology. Metaphysics is irreducibly a philosophical concept about the first causes, principles and origins of all existing things.

One must stress that we are not addressing anything that is outside the Cosmos. Indeed, every physical object is also a metaphysical object, in its connection with its origin and foundation.

In this way, as a methodological criterion, Metaphysics concerns the foundation of all the existing things as such. It is, thus, about inquiring in the things themselves, that which, in them, is present as their originary and originating condition, which means that a metaphysical inquiry demands that one questions the foundation itself, that, as such, is present in the things, themselves, as that which maintains them and sustains them as entities, identities and integrities existent and subsistent, in themselves and by themselves.

The foundation is a principle of reason and, thus, of proportion, pattern, number. As Leibniz stated “nihil est sine ratione”. The foundation is incorporated in the nature of the things themselves, as their possibility as existent things, in themselves and by themselves (autonomy).

That which Metaphysics strives for is to find not only that proportion/symmetry/order but that which preceded it. It is no longer, in this last case, about inquiring the being, entity or identity, but about questioning the foundation itself, and, thus, searching for the originating principle of the foundation itself, as its existing potential (Aristotle) anteriority, that is, what ordering principle (number, pattern, order) underlies the foundation itself as an existent foundation of each individuated existent.

Whenever a cosmologist is addressing the first causes, principles and origin of the Cosmos/Order and the entanglement that we call Universe, inquiring about the nature of the laws of physics, or upon the foundations of physics he/she is in a metaphysical inquiry, having to make an effort to interpret that which exists in the Cosmos outside his/her logocentrically conventioned closed mental models and Sapiens' logics, which, in many cases, and in an abusive way, are called metaphysical models, putting into evidence a total lack of knowledge of the notion of Metaphysics itself.

Music and Eternity

Source: Gonçalves, C.P. (2019), Messengers, 

https://www.deviantart.com/cpgoncalves/art/Messengers-797306523

The myth assigned music a divine origin. The Pythagoreans, in turn, referred it (music) to a metaphysical acoustic, in which the intervals and the numerical relations, underlying the relations of consonance, were considered to the formulation of a doctrine of the ethos of the tonality, of the rhythms and of the instruments, all of this correlated with the effects produced in the listeners.

The order of the world and of everything was configured by the harmony and union of the diverse (Philolaus), and this harmony was determined by numerical relations. The soul of each man, as sound, could enter in tune with the order of things and with the music of the spheres.

As Mathesis Universalis, music can be considered as a combinatorial topology of signs that expresses in a hieroglyphic resonance that which the logos hides, Leibniz called it the hidden exercise of an arithmetic of the soul.

This is about questioning the organic and trans-organic feeling (the nostalgy in Mähler/Adorno) about the temporality and trans-temporality to attain an outside of the chronological time, an urgrund (Schelling), and hence concurrent with the first creation.

Musicality is not necessarily restricted to musical pieces. Letters and phrases evoke sounds, and it is possible to convey an additional sense through the topological motion of the verb. The written text has a musical semantics and syntax naturally embedded through the resendings between the written text itself and the verbal articulation (even interior to the reader) of that same text.

Each written text resends towards a metaphysical sense as its first cause. The text is not surrounded, but crossed through by its limit, marked in its interior by the multiple tracks of its margin. Proposing simultaneously the monument and the mirage of the trace (différance, Derrida, Marges de la Philosophie), the trace, simultaneously marked and erased, simultaneously alive and dead, lives, as always, from simulating the life in its kept inscription.

Schopenhauer considered the existence of an infinite will, independent of all the individuation, existing in any living being as an infinite principle, unique and indivisible (or noumenon), without any connection to space/time/causality that, for Schopenhauer, constituted the principium individuationis. This will objectivates itself as an eidos, accessible through art, revealing itself in music as direct and immediate presence of a transcendence (a perspective that Wagner’s music exemplifies).

Steiner (Grammars of Creation) states that music signals and puts in resonant motion that which, in humans, exists as noumenon.

Spinoza's conatus

by Maria Odete

Spinoza considered the exercise of human reason as an intense desiderative activity in which the desire could obtain the plenitude of satisfaction. The reason, as ratio cognoscendi, positions itself as a terminal phase of the desire and as the complete satisfaction of that desire.

Spinoza's conatus, that influenced Nietzsche so much, was thought of as a primordial energy or potentia that exceeded the human reason and in which the desire had its origin. Man was first defined by Spinoza, in the book III of ethics, as a conatus, and, only after, considered as a rational being. The conatus is active and in act and explicates itself by the power of being affected and, because of that, possesses a tendency to maintain at the maximum the capability of being affected.

The thought is an attribute in a permanent circuit of resendings to the conatus or potentia and, it is, by itself, all the objective condition that the absolute potentia of thinking possesses a priori as unconditioned totality.

Damásio (2003) interpreted the conatus as an impetus of self-preservation in permanent actualization, locating it in the cerebral circuits as an aggregate of dispositions that, once activated by the internal or external environment, represent themselves by chemical and neural signals and lead to a search for overlife and well being.

Nietzsche - the übermensch

by Maria Odete Madeira

The übermensch announced by Zarathustra, was a protoplasmic figure synthesized by the Dionysian universe created by Nietzsche, who, affected by the profound suffering caused by his illness, invested all his creative potential in an individuation, which he called the übermensch and that dragged him to a metaphysical rotation. The human was, for Nietzsche, the deformity and the nausea. The übermensch was, himself, Nietzsche, considered by Nietzsche as an archetype, a self-creating instinct freed from god and gods, tensionally fragmented and permanently reconfigured in a territory of forces in permanent becoming.

The übermensch, configured from flows and reflows of forces of life, of madness and of death and, despite the suffering, and because of the suffering, amor fati, but the love of a fate metaphysically projected. Nietzsche was, himself, and in himself, amor fati.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubermensch

http://joe-jitsu.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D25B2ECC7C29CB05!341.entry

Metaphysics...

by Maria Odete Madeira

The term metaphysics (ta meta ta physika) refers to the branch of philosophy that studies the first causes, principles and origins of all things. Causes, determinations, reasons and respective foundations are approached within metaphysics. 

As a science of the first principles and the first causes of all existing things, metaphysics is an archeology (arche). As science of the being as being it is ontology.

Metaphysics is irreducibly a philosophical concept about the first causes, principles and origins of all existing things, one must stress that we are not addressing anything that is outside the Cosmos/Order. Indeed, every physical object is also a metaphysical object, in its connection with its origin and foundation.

Whenever a cosmologist is talking about the first causes and the first principles of the Cosmos/Order, inquiring about the nature of the laws of physics, or upon the foundations of physics he/she is in a metaphysical inquiry, metaphysics plays an important part in today's cosmology, a fact that is undeniable and widely known throughout the scientific community. When one does research about the foundations of science one is also within a metaphysical context of discourse.

Defining Knowledge - About Intentionality

by Maria Odete Madeira

Aristotle introduced the concept of intentionality, when he worked in the problem "relation/knowing", having concluded that the mode of reference of a particular individual's idea to the object constituted the intentionality of the individual's idea.

The medieval scholastics returned to the concept proposing, for it, the expression "intendere arcum in" (the act of pointing an arrow towards something). Intentionality, in the philosophical sense of the term, simply means an aboutness, that should be interpreted as a directedness towards something.

The mechanism of intentionality applies to any entity that may be considered as an agent dispositionally gifted of a strategically operative internal structure. The origins of life can be traced to the origins of agency, the biological activity possesses, foundationally, in its adaptive nature an intentional drive, as the organism actively addresses (is directed towards) the environment and its own survival.

The self-replicating macromolecules, the thermostats, the amoebas, the mice, the bats, people and, even, chess playing computers are intentional systems (Dennett). In a more general sense any complex adaptive system is an intentional system (Holland; Gell-Mann; Damásio).

All living organisms, both those that are made up of a single cell, as well as those that are made up of billions of cells are systematically formed by spatialized intentional structures, temporally permanent, strategically committed to their survival, limited by borders, in permanent interface with the environment, depending, the individuality of each organism, upon the existence of that border.

A living organism such as an amoeba, being alive, it is strongly committed to keep on living. Being a creature with no brain, certainly it is not aware of the intentions of its organism in the same way that an organism with a brain may know its organism's intentions, nonetheless, the tiny creature exhibits in a very dynamic and effective form of intentionality in the way it is able to maintain the chemical profile of its internal milieu, while, around it, in the external environment, everything changes quickly. As Lewontin stressed, all living organisms have the ability to act in function of time and of regulating biological rates which, in mathematical discourse, is equivalent to stating that they also make integral and differential calculations.

Defining Knowledge II

by Maria Odete Madeira

We can talk about the knowledge trying to define it, as such, or we can talk about the knowledge, from its production or its creation. Any production of knowledge is supported by an organizing activity that acts intentionally according to rules and whose objective is the resolution of problems and its own replication. The discovery of the double helix, by Watson and Crick, allowed one to apply, to the notion of living organization, the cybernetic scheme of a machine governed by an informational program, inscribed in the structure of the molecules of DNA, that organizes and runs all the cellular activity. In this way, a living organization can be signaled and referred to as a self-cognitive, self-organizing and self-replicating agent that is capable, through exchanges with the environment, of concentrating in itself the flows of order that prevent its disaggregation. "Being, doing and knowing are inseparable" (Morin).The access to knowledge, as well as any attempt of definition, can only be made, through the activity of the organizations, of the agents, of the beings or entities, or of the subjects, this, if we wish to have definitions of knowledge disambiguated, plausible and empirically verifiable.