Intro to Metaphysics & Epistemology - Peterson Academy

⬅️ Peterson Academy - Course Notes Index · Domain: 60.9 Philosophy · Notebook index: Personal Journal

Provenance

Written up 2026-08-02 from your handwritten notes: March 21 – June 9 2026 notebook, pp. 58–71 (PDF pp. 64–77) — 14 continuous pages, the longest single run in either notebook. Each section links to the page it came from. Structure and wording follow your notes; nothing has been added from outside them.

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① Origins of Reality

→ notebook p. 58 (file not included in this release)

Metaphysics is the meta-step: there’s the physical world, and then there’s your attitude toward it — what is true?

Two broad epistemic models:

Metaphysical contrasts — the questions each model answers differently:

• Ontology — sub-branch of metaphysics. The “furniture of the universe”: what kinds of things exist.
• Causation — what causes what? Is causation linear, cyclical, progressive, regressive? Is there one basic causal force or many?

→ p. 59 (file not included in this release) adds the framing question: illusion vs. fact — how facts are identified, and how truth differs from appearance.

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② Essential Questions

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Basic metaphysical categories — metaphysics as the study of the most basic features of reality:

A Being / existence · B Identity / nature / attributes · C Change · D Space · E Time · F Self / consciousness / awareness

Ship of Theseus (Plutarch)

Replace every part of a ship one by one until none of the original parts remain. Is it the same ship? If not, at what point did it become another ship?

The Problem of Being

Do we simply affirm existence, or ask why existence exists?

Affirmationist position — reality is real; existence exists; what is, is.

• Aristotle’s starting point: reality is the fundamental axiom. One cannot get “behind” reality to explain it.

Explanatory position — why does existence exist?

Counterargument against the “why existence” question:

• “Why” presupposes cause and effect.
• One cannot step outside existence to explain existence.

Heidegger rejects the rationalist dismissal of the question: reason itself may block deeper thought — the case for doing something more non-rational.

The live question: is existence self-evident and ultimate, or must existence itself be explained?

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③ Identity, Essence and Change

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What makes a thing the kind of thing it is? Is identity intrinsic, or imposed from outside?

The central divide — three positions:

1. Existence and identity are intrinsically united
2. Existence comes first, identity later
3. Essence comes first, existence later

Change — real, impossible, or compatible with identity?

Against change — Parmenides & Zeno: if something changes, one property must cease to be and another must come into being from non-being. Zeno’s paradoxes. Our senses say change is real; reason says it’s impossible — therefore trust reason, distrust the senses. (Parmenides as early rationalist.)

Heraclitus: change is fundamental, identity is unstable. “You can’t step into the same river twice.” And crucially — if logic cannot account for change, that’s a problem for logic, not for reality.

Aristotle’s middle position: things have determinate identities, and those identities include potentials. Change is the actualization of potentials. Caterpillar → butterfly.

Space and time — absolute, relative, or subjective?

• Newton — absolute space and time
• Einstein — relative and relational
• Hume — broadly skeptical about metaphysical concepts; they may be meaningless
• Kant — Hume “awakened him from his dogmatic slumber.” Space and time are added by the mind, not found in the world

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④ Nature & Super-Nature

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First argument for God: existence and the problem of ultimate explanation

The regress, in your own four steps:

1. The universe can’t exist without a cause
2. Then God also needs a cause → infinite regress: God, super-God, super-super-God
3. Make God an exception — God “just is”
4. If exceptions are allowed, why not say the universe “just is”? Why add an extra explanatory layer?

The Argument from Evil

Traditional conception of God: all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, creator of the world.

Alternatives if none hold: weaken the concept of God, or a developing God.

Kant → epistemological idealism: humans don’t know things as they are, but only as ideas formed in the mind.

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⑤ First Perceptions

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What epistemology is trying to do: distinguish knowledge and belief from fallacy, error and fantasy — how knowledge is possible, what counts as justified belief, how cognitive processes succeed or fail.

Direct realism

• Direct contact with reality; sensation is a direct relational state between organism and world
• Thomas Reid — perception produces immediate belief (this is the Scottish common sense realism thread you keep returning to)
• J. J. Gibson — embodied perception; reality has rich structure, not raw chaos; perception is not a frozen snapshot like an illusion
• Ayn Rand — direct realist, foundationalist; higher cognition → sensory experience
• Challenges: railroad tracks · pencil in water · Necker cube · duck–rabbit

Indirect realism / representationalism

• We are directly aware of mental representations, images or appearances — not external reality — and infer an external world from them. Perception is re-presentation.
• Analogy: a man in a submarine looking outside via signals and displays.
• Problem: you can’t compare the representation with reality itself.

The skeptical slide

Descartes (not himself an idealist) supplies two arguments — the illusion argument (perception sometimes deceives, so can’t be fully trusted) and the dream argument (how do we know we’re not dreaming now?). Intended to overcome skepticism; later philosophers found his solutions inadequate, which pushed philosophy toward skepticism → solipsism → idealism.

• Berkeley — to be is to be perceived
• Kant — the culminating figure in the move away from direct realism toward subject-centred philosophy; abandon objectivism and work within subjectivist constraints

Direct realist response: reject the homunculus (the little inner observer). Perception is an embodied, integrated response to reality.

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⑥ Theories of Concepts

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Hume’s route to nominalism: all ideas are copies of impressions; since impressions are particular, ideas are also particular; concepts are ultimately labels or regroupings of particular impressions.

(Your notes carry the dog-ness illustration: real dog-ness → dog-ness is an idea in your mind → “dog” is just a name we use.)

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⑦ Objective vs Subjective

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The distinction that does the most work in your arguments

A. Metaphysical use — objective = objects, reality, what exists outside the subject; subjective = the self, the I.
B. Epistemological use — objective = a way of using one’s mind that stays connected to reality; subjective = a way of thinking detached from reality.

Much of the confusion comes from mixing these two contexts. This is the same move that carries the Andrew Wilson rebuttal — “situated” is not the same as “merely subjective.”

Plato / mysticism as a response to skepticism: pure knowledge requires getting rid of bodily interference — contemplating things with the soul alone.

Kant as transitional figure: we cannot know things as they are in themselves, but we can still think them. “I had therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”

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⑧ What is Faith?

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Six distinct accounts of faith

1. Avoiding evidence by modifying the hypothesis — Flew, the Parable of the Gardener
2. Reinterpreting evidence to fit the hypothesis — R. M. Hare
3. A feeling-of-trust connection — Basil Mitchell
4. Willing yourself to believe something desirable — William James
5. Sacrificing reason and leaping into absurdity — Kierkegaard, Luther
6. Following the authority of others / habituation — Pascal

• Antony Flew — when contrary evidence appears, instead of abandoning the hypothesis they modify it to preserve belief.
• R. M. Hare — a fixed lens or interpretive posture through which all evidence is filtered; evidence gets reinterpreted to fit the unchanged belief.
• Basil Mitchell — faith as personal, feeling-based, a trust relationship.
• Huxley — “Agnosticism is not a creed, but a method… follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration” and “do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.” → strength of belief should scale with strength of evidence.
• William James, The Will to Believe — “Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?” → faith as willing belief when evidence is unavailable and the issue matters.
• Kierkegaard — “Faith does not need [proof]; aye, it must even regard the proof as its enemy.” → faith as commitment to the absurd; not a defect on its own terms.
• Luther — “reason is the greatest enemy that faith has.” → believing despite reason.
• Pascal — “act as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said… this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.” → faith through habituation and social conditioning.

Your own observation on the page: most but not all mainstream religions are agnostic — “we believe in…” without making knowledge claims; God’s nature cannot be fully comprehended.

Locke’s counterweight (Essay Concerning Human Understanding): “The floating of other men’s opinions in our brains makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true… In the sciences, every one has so much as he really knows and comprehends. What he believes only, and takes upon trust, are but shreds.”

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⑨ The Human Being — the mind–body problem

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Early anatomical challenges to dualism: Vesalius (1555); Harvey on the heart, debunking it as the seat of the soul.

Arguments for dualism: broader metaphysical support (natural + supernatural); different vocabularies for physical and mental.

Main criticism of dualism — the problem of interaction: if mind and body are radically different substances, how do they causally interact? How can chemicals affect the mind?

Main criticism of reductive materialism: it refuses to explain what is most obvious to lived experience — consciousness, action, inner life.

The best line in the whole block

The hidden shared premise of dualism and reductive materialism: both assume the psychological cannot be explained in physical terms.

That’s why emergence is the third option — when matter is organized in sufficiently complex ways, genuinely new phenomena can emerge.

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⑩ The Meaning of It All

→ notebook p. 71 (file not included in this release)

Largely a mapped overview rather than prose notes: volition and the problem of free will, forms of determinism (biological, environmental & social conditioning, divine & supernatural, indeterminism & quantum mechanics), and four broad answers on meaning — God’s drama, eternal recurrence, entropy & pointlessness, and the not-yet-known.

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🔗 How this feeds your arguments

This course is the substrate under several things you already argue

• ⑦ Objective vs Subjective is the distinction doing the work in Andrew Wilson and the “situated ≠ merely subjective” reply. The metaphysical/epistemological ambiguity is named here.
• ② The Problem of Being and ④ the regress of causes are the same structure as Agrippa's Trilemma and Problem of the Criterion — where does justification bottom out, and is an exception principled or special pleading?
• ⑧ What is Faith is a ready-made taxonomy for Christian Nationalism and Transcendental Argument for God — it lets you ask which account of faith someone is using before answering it.
• ⑤ Direct vs indirect realism underlies Foundationalism and the Thomas Reid line you cite as Scottish common sense realism.
• ④ The Argument from Evil table is a complete response-and-objection map, usable as-is.