Fathom.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics asks what the world is made of at the most general level — not which particles, which is physics, but which kinds of thing there are and what it takes to be one.[1] Does the table go on existing when nobody is in the room (realism) or is being perceived part of what its existence consists in (idealism)? Is a mind the same sort of thing as a body (materialism) or something else entirely (dualism)? Is redness a thing in its own right, or only a word for what red things have in common (universals)?

Underneath those runs a question about modality — about the merely possible. An acorn is not an oak, and yet it is not nothing-to-do-with an oak either; the vocabulary of actuality and potentiality exists to say what that difference is. The positions below are the recurring answers, and each is best understood through the objection it exists to survive.

Drill down
Realism
The view that things exist independently of anyone's mind — the world would be as it is whether or not it were perceived or thought about.
Idealism
The view that reality is fundamentally mental — what exists is minds and their contents, or at least nothing knowable is independent of them.
Actuality and Potentiality
Aristotle's pair for making sense of change — what a thing is now, and what it has it in itself to become. Actualization is the passage from the second to the first.
Materialism
The view that everything that exists is physical — including minds, which are what certain physical systems do rather than an addition to them.
Dualism
The view that mind and matter are two fundamentally different kinds of thing — and the problem of how they could possibly interact.
Universals
The problem of what two red things share. Realists say there is a property they both have; nominalists say there are only the things and a word we apply to both.
Related concepts
Epistemology
Related docs
EpistemologyMetaphysicsActuality and PotentialityDualismIdealismMaterialismRealismUniversalsPhilosophy
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Sources
  1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Metaphysics
  2. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Metaphysics