[Guille]

Originally Posted by Benedict Broere You are expressing a belief. I think metaphysics is not dead at all. For instance the reduction of reality to the physical, and I have the impression that this your point of view, is a metaphysical point of view. There is nothing in science that will proof you that this reality is only physical. You assume this reality is only physical. Materialism is a metaphysical standpoint. Btw, 'metaphysical' can also mean 'Laws and Constants'. Aristotle would love it. And Plato would go through the roof!

I'm not a reductionist to science. I do not believe that the physics will explain everything. There is philosophy. But within philosophy, metaphysics has been abandoned. It is not a belief. Do you know any metaphysicist of today? Philosophers are either posmodern or pragmatic, and both types have abandoned metaphysics. Of course, these two movements will die and others will come, this is how everything in culture progresses (science, art, philosophy...). But not religion, it doesn't change, and that's why it stays behind. New types of philosophyzings are needed, including philosophizing about what metaphysics used to philosophize, but not using metaphysics, just other alternatives. Metaphysics gained in modernism it's most extreme and terrible properties, Kant-Hegel. But KH only constructed the biggest and worst building, the thing is that metaphysics by having such buildings, lead to it's deconstruction, to it's neglection, to it's abandonment. Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida (on the continental side) and James, Dewey and Croce (on the pragmatic side). The final difference is given by Gadamer's hermeneutics and Wittgenstein's languagology. I know that 'when there is science, there is philosophy' this is something no one can neglect. I do not assume that reality is only physical. And I know materialism is a philosophical viewpoint (posmodernists are materialists, pragmatists are materialists...).