Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Metaphysics.
  • noun A system of metaphysics.
  • noun An underlying philosophical or theoretical principle.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To make metaphysical.
  • Same as metaphysical.
  • noun Same as metaphysics.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Metaphysical.
  • noun See metaphysics.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective philosophy, archaic Metaphysical.
  • noun philosophy, uncountable, archaic The field of study of metaphysics.
  • noun philosophy, countable The metaphysical system of a particular philosopher or of a particular school of thought.
  • noun philosophy, countable A fundamental principle or key concept.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English methaphisik, metaphisik; see metaphysics.]

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Examples

  • As Crary notes, "movement and time could be seen and experienced, but never represented" (34), and hence the camera obscura "is inseparable from a certain metaphysic of interiority: it is a figure for both the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world" (39).

    Smoke and Mirrors: Internalizing the Magic Lantern show in _Vilette_ 2005

  • A very little reflection will be sufficient to satisfy us that without the aid of conceptions higher than those of sense-experience -- and that is all the word metaphysic means -- it would be absolutely impossible to formulate a single scientific generalisation.

    Morality as a Religion An exposition of some first principles W. R. Washington Sullivan

  • The metaphysic of speculative reason is what is commonly called metaphysic in the more limited sense.

    The Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1764

  • One can say, at any rate, that deformed in his own private life, he became absorbed in what has come to be called the metaphysic of a bureaucratic nightmare in which one is born powerless, accused and self-accused, not knowing of what.

    The Logic of Franz Kafka Pritchett, V.S. 1982

  • The speculative part of metaphysic, which has especially appropriated this appellation -- that which we have called the metaphysic of nature -- and which considers everything, as it is (not as it ought to be), by means of a priori conceptions, is divided in the following manner.

    The Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant 1764

  • If there exists on any subject a philosophy (that is, a system of rational knowledge based on concepts), then there must also be for this philosophy a system of pure rational concepts, independent of any condition of intuition, in other words, a metaphysic.

    The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics Immanuel Kant 1764

  • The system which has thus arisen appears to be a kind of metaphysic narrowed to the point of view of the individual mind, through which, as through some new optical instrument limiting the sphere of vision, the interior of thought and sensation is examined.

    Theaetetus 2007

  • You start with a limerick, you conclude with a metaphysic: man alone and pants-down absurd in a universe crammed with meanings.

    The Clock is Ticking for Jack Bauer 2010

  • (The Modern account of nature) And a curious paper by Wolfgang Schmidt, who contends that the paradoxes of quantum theory are due entirely to the Cartesian metaphysic adopted by the Moderns: "From Schroedinger's Cat to Thomistic Ontology."

    August 10th, 2009 m_francis 2009

  • He also warns against metaphysic construction of time.

    Jason Derr: Seeing The Future In 3-D: Incarnation And The Sputnik Moment Jason Derr 2011

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