15 June 2019

On Metaphysics (Unsourced)


"All philosophy is like a tree, the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches are all the other sciences." (René Descartes)

"Mathematics is the only good metaphysics." (Lord William T Kelvin)

"There is no drawing the line between physics and metaphysics. If you examine every day facts at all closely, you are a physicist; but if you press your physics at all home, you become a metaphysician; if you press your metaphysics at all home, you are in a fog." (Samuel Butler)

"Learn just enough of the subject [metaphysics] to enable your mind to get rid of it." (Benjamin Jowett)

"Metaphysics: An attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible." (Henry L Mencken)

"Science, as usually taught to liberal arts students, emphasizes results rather than method, and tries to teach technique rather than to give insight into and understanding of the scientific habit of thought. What is needed, however, is not a dose of metaphysics but a truly humanistic teaching of science." (Harry D Gideonse)

"Nothing is more fruitful - all mathematicians know it - than those obscure analogies, those disturbing reflections of one theory on another; those furtive caresses, those inexplicable discords; nothing also gives more pleasure to the researcher. The day comes when this illusion dissolves: the presentiment turns into certainty; the yoked theories reveal their common source before disappearing. " (André Weil)

"Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science or complement of sciences exclusively occupied with mind." (Sir William Hamilton)

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