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Metaphysical Problems and Education Volume II, Issue VIII, December 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 Metaphysical Problems and Education Chaman Lal Banga Assistant Professor (Education) Department of Education, ICDEOL, Himachal Pradesh University Shimla India Abstract Philosophy and education are two interrelated disciplines. This is because both centre on man and development. Education makes use of philosophy both as a foundation and the culmination of imparting knowledge and values for human development. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world. Metaphysics is the study of the nature of things. Metaphysicians ask what kinds of things exist, and what they are like. They reason about such things as whether or not people have free will, in what sense abstract objects can be said to exist, and how it is that brains are able to generate minds. Metaphysics as a speculative branch of philosophy was examined to be a foundation for education. Concepts such as “Matter”, “Mind, “Body”, “Soul, “Reality” among others remain metaphysical issues in education that need to be re-visited for new perspectives to educational thought. Metaphysics prepares the philosopher of education to examine philosophic questions to the extent to which they bear on education issues. Metaphysics as a branch of philosophy involves a speculative way of thinking about world realities to imprint on oneself some transcendental principles that constitute their foundations. Aristotle developed the study of metaphysics to be studied after physics. While physics studies the law of external form of existence, metaphysics thinks over the real essence of things. Its main problems are: What is the nature of existence? What is reality? What is truth? What are its different forms? Is the world one or many? What is space? What is fact? What is casualty? What is change? Is there is God? Has the world progressed? etc. This paper highlights metaphysical problems and relationship of metaphysics and education. Key words: Metaphysics, philosophy, education and problems. http://www.ijellh.com 352 Volume II, Issue VIII, December 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 Introduction Today, the word "metaphysics" has become a description of many fields of interest such as: philosophy, religion, spirituality, parapsychology, mysticism, yoga, dreams, Jungian psychology, astrology, meditation, self-help studies, positive thinking, holistic healing, life after death, reincarnation, etc. The definition of Uduigwomen and Jeje (1999) sums up this point. They said; Metaphysics is usually defined as the science, which treats the fundamental problems of knowledge and reality transcending experience. Actually to call metaphysics a science makes a cognitive connection with it and besides every science is preoccupied with some fundamentals of nature1. Metaphysics makes a necessary connection with science since science is all about nature and metaphysics builds on the study of nature. The task of metaphysics is to determine the meaning and the coherence in nature. In contrast, metaphysics is "the branch of philosophy that deals with first principles and seeks to explain the nature of being or reality (ontology) and of the origin and structure of the world (cosmology)...popularly, any very subtle, perplexing, or difficult reasoning" (McKechnie, 1979, 1132). Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the nature of the world. It is the study of being or reality. A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into what categories of things are in the world and what relations these things bear to one another. The word metaphysics also has a simple or literal meaning and a technical meaning. It is a branch of philosophy that enquires into the problem of existence. It tries to resolve such issues as: What the ultimate nature, origin and essence of being is; the ground and basis of all existence; the nature of man and the world in which he lives; whether man has a soul and if he has, how does it function, and what happens to it at death? The metaphysician also attempts to clarify the notions by which people understand the world, including existence, object hood, property, space, time, causality, and possibility. Metaphysics, the philosophical study whose object is to determine the real nature of things- to determine the meaning, structure, and principles of whatever is insofar as it is. Although this study is popularly conceived as referring to anything excessively subtle and highly theoretical and although it has been subjected to many criticisms, it is presented by metaphysicians as the most fundamental and most comprehensive of inquiries, inasmuch as it is concerned with reality as a whole. Four views will be briefly considered; they present metaphysics as: (1) an inquiry into what exists, or what really exists; (2) the science of reality, as opposed to http://www.ijellh.com 353 Volume II, Issue VIII, December 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 appearance; (3) the study of the world as a whole; (4) a theory of first principles. Metaphysics is the foundation of philosophy. Without an explanation or an interpretation of the world around us, we would be helpless to deal with reality. We could not feed ourselves, or act to preserve our lives. Reality is absolute. It has a specific nature independent of our thoughts or feelings. The world around us is real. It has a specific nature and it must be consistent to that nature. A proper metaphysical worldview must aim to understand reality correctly. The physical world exists, and every entity has a specific nature. It acts according to that nature. When different entities interact, they do so according to the nature of both. Every action has a cause and an effect. Causality is the means by which change occurs, but the change occurs via a specific nature. Aristotle’s philosophia prima or metaphysics is concerned with real being and its attributes. In other words it is concerned with the very nature of a thing, with being itself, with the root principle, causes and operations of existing things. To Aristotle metaphysics deals with the most fundamental and deepest aspects of reality and was viewed as the queen of the sciences. The Scholastics referred to empirical physical sciences as “real sciences” or “scientiae reales” as these sciences studied things such as objects, substances, processes, organisms etc. They also labelled the study of logic, the process of attaining certain proofs and truths, as a “rational science” or “scientia rationalis”. Branches of metaphysics Metaphysics includes ontology, philosophy of self, cosmogony, cosmology and theology as the branches of metaphysics A) Philosophical Ontology An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization. This is fundamental branch of metaphysics. In it are studied the eternal and temporal, the limited and unlimited elements of the world and their interrelations. Its main problem is the explanation of Reality and Existence. A body of formally represented knowledge is based on a conceptualization: the objects, concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them (Genesereth & Nilsson, 1987). An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. The term is borrowed from philosophy, where an Ontology is a systematic account of Existence. Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ is often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early http://www.ijellh.com 354 Volume II, Issue VIII, December 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. Sometimes ‘ontology’ is used in a broader sense, to refer to the study of what might exist; ‘metaphysics’ is then used for the study of which of the various alternative possible ontologies is in fact true of reality. B) Philosophy of self The subject matter of this branch of metaphysics is the nature of self. Its main question is: Who I am? The main dictum of the philosophy of Socrates was “Know thyself”. The philosophy of self defines the essential qualities that make one person distinct from all others. There have been numerous approaches to defining these qualities. The self is the idea of a unified being which is the source of consciousness. Moreover, this self is the agent responsible for the thoughts and actions of an individual to which they are ascribed. Lao Tzu, in his Tao Te Ching, says "Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment. Mastering others requires force. Mastering the self requires strength." Adi Shankaracharya, in his commentary on Bhagavad Gita says "Self-knowledge alone eradicates misery". "Self-knowledge alone is the means to the highest bliss.” "Absolute perfection is the consummation of Self-knowledge. Aristotle, following Plato, defined the soul as the core essence of a living being, but argued against its having a separate existence. For instance, if a knife had a soul, the act of cutting would be that soul, because 'cutting' is the essence of what it is to be a knife. Unlike Plato and the religious traditions, Aristotle did not consider the soul as some kind of separate, ghostly occupant of the body (just as we cannot separate the activity of cutting from the knife). C) Cosmogony Cosmology is the study of the structure and changes in the present universe, while the scientific field of cosmogony is concerned with the origin of the universe. Observations about our present universe may not only allow predictions to be made about the future, but they also provide clues to events that happened long ago when ... the cosmos began. So the work of cosmologists and cosmogonists overlaps. Cosmogony is any theory concerning the coming into existence (or origin) of either the cosmos (or universe), or the so-called reality of sentient beings.
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