METAPHYSICS AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY

METAPHYSICS AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY

            According to Aristotle, “…there as many parts of philosophy as there are kinds of substance, so that there must necessarily be among them a first philosophy and one which follows this.” Throughout his Metaphysics, Aristotle considers Metaphysics as first philosophy, but does not make clearly what first philosophy consists of. According to Tuomas E. Tahko, the first philosophy is an account of what is, or what it means to be, fundamental. Things that are most fundamental are not grounded in anything more fundamental, they are ontologically independent. What this means more importantly is that, the study of fundamentality focuses on giving an account of what it is for something to be fundamental. However, this does not rule out the possibility that this study may also involve an account of which things are (or could be) fundamental. For Tahko, it is in terms of the notion of essence rather than fundamentality, grounding or ontological independence, that we can best characterize the whole idea of first philosophy. Metaphysics then, is the science of essence.

FIRST PHILOSOPHY IN ARISTOTLE

Aristotle considers the science of being qua being as the first philosophy. The subject of first philosophy here is being, which is studied qua being (being as it is in itself). This contrasts first philosophy which natural science which merely studies being not as it is in itself, but rather, with a particular end or purpose in mind.

            In Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1026a25-33, he tells us that it is ‘substance’ that first philosophy studies. Further, in Meta. 1028b3-8, he tells us that the question of being is simply the question of substance. As said earlier, for Tahko, understanding substances as essences, is the best way of accommodating the Aristotelian idea of metaphysics as the first philosophy in contemporary metaphysics. Regarding Essence, Aristotle says: “The Essence of a thing is what it is said to be in virtue of itself.” But what is the link between contemporary analytic metaphysics (with Aristotelian influences) and the Aristotelian idea of metaphysics as first philosophy.

FUNDAMENTALITY, GROUNDING, ONTOLOGICAL INDEPENDENCE AND ESSENCE

            The four notions here are currently receiving an abundance of interest in analytic metaphysics. They all have roots in Aristotle, and this is often explicitly acknowledged in the literature. For instance, Jonathan Schaffer on grounding and fundamentality, firmly avers that for Aristotle, metaphysics is about what is fundamental in the sense of not being grounded in anything else. It is natural to think of first philosophy as the discipline that studies the ultimate ground of reality. Irrefragably, essences have a status of primary substances in Aristotle and are hence a natural candidate for the subject matter of first philosophy. But, essences are not the ultimate ground of reality in the sense that Schaffer talks about ultimate ground. Essences should more be understood as answering the ‘what it is’ question, which may include an account of what grounds the existence of an entity, but essences themselves are primitive for Aristotle and are hence not grounded in anything else.

THE SCIENCE OF ESSENCE AS THE FIRST PHILOSOPHY

            As Tahko avers consistent with Lowe too, Essence precedes Existence. Lowe acquiescing the above claim, buttresses it by saying that, essence precedes existence both ontologically and epistemically. Essence preceding existence ontologically means that, it is a precondition of something’s existing that its essence does not preclude its existence. Essence preceding existence epistemically means that we can in general know the essence of something X antecedently to knowing whether or not X exists. This conception of essence means that essences themselves are not entities because entities must have an essence. If essences themselves were entities, this would produce an infinite regress of a rather vicious sort, since essences themselves, being entities, would have to have essences, and so on.

            The essence of a thing is not simply meant to refer to the ultimate or fundamental ground of being of a thing. Rather, it just refers to being, that is, what it is, or would be, for a thing to exist. More so, essence is more of a statement of what the being of the entity consists in; its existence, identity and persistence conditions.

            But what is the relationship between essence and modality? While Tahko agrees with Lowe and Fine on the ontological order of explanation between essence and modality, he further considers the epistemic order of explanation to be debatable. Basically, Tahko subscribes to the position that, in the ontological relationship between essence and modality, not all necessary truths about a given object X are essential truths about X, but all necessary truths are grounded in essential truths (about something or other). This implies that essential truths about X are a proper subset of the necessary truths about X, but even those necessary truths about X that are not essential truths about X are nevertheless essential truths about something.

            On the epistemic side, things get murkier. While Lowe is of the opinion that our epistemic access to essence is direct and a priori, and generally within everyone’s capabilities, Tahko sides Lowe to the extent that the science of essence must be an a priori discipline, but differs from Lowe on the nature of our a priori access to essence, which he considers indirect. Specifically, for Tahko, we have direct a priori access to modal truths rather than essentialist truths. Further, since all modal truths are to be grounded in essentialist truths, there is a necessary link between modal and essentialist truths.

            The problem of propria now arises. For Aristotle, there are necessary, but inessential, properties called propria. Propria do not tell us what a thing is, that is, they do not answer the ‘what it is’ question or Corkum’s ‘how’ question. Tahko provides a solution to this quandary by beginning what the assumption that, we have a priori access to metaphysical possibility, and it is via this modal knowledge that we access the essences of all possible kinds of entities, whether they exist in the actual world or not. This process is empirically indefeasible in the sense that it only concerns possibilities.

But for Lowe, knowledge of essence is possible, for it is a product simply of understanding. For Lowe, the link between grasping the essence of a thing with understanding what a thing is, consists in the fact that some knowledge of the essence of a goatstag (for example) is needed to even understand what is being said or comprehending talk about, say, goatstags. This is the heart of the problem of propria.

Tahko then employs Higgs Boson case study to solve the problem of propria. From the case study, our epistemic access is to possible rather than actual essences. It is the ultimately the task of empirical science to determine which of the candidate essences that we conjecture are actual essences, that is, which combinations of essential features make up genuine kinds. The genuine, actual essences must be determined or confirmed (not discovered) by empirical evidence. But then, we can only make an educated guess about which essences are genuine, which makes the process fallibilistic. Science determines whether we guessed correctly, but science is, of course, amenable to revision as well.

Our epistemic access to essence is hence a piecemeal, complex matter, yet a necessary precursor of philosophical and scientific knowledge.

            On the whole, the understanding of metaphysics as first philosophy rests on the idea that metaphysics is the science of essence. Essence precedes existence ontologically. Although the study of essence takes epistemic priority, the picture would not be complete without empirical input. This is in consonance with Aristotelian philosophy, wherein, natural science plays an important role in Aristotle’s metaphysics. What then makes metaphysics the first philosophy is its ontological as well as epistemic priority over natural science, rather than complete independence of empirical science.