Ginkgo,Ginkgo wrote:I am guessing it has something to do with a study that existed before science. That is to say, modern science, rather than natural science.Greylorn Ell wrote:
BTW, a serious student of metaphysics might refer to the subject as "antephysics," even without knowing a word of the Greek language. Do you know why? Or, does anyone?
I appreciate your willingness to tackle this.
Aristotle's thoughts about physics were mixed, confused, and almost entirely incorrect, but because he was a brilliant bullshit artist, he acquired a following, including students.
After his demise some of them undertook the project of gathering up his ideas and categorizing them. They put his ideas about physics into a single category, and got most of them in the right box. Aristotle was smart enough to realize that the physics he (incorrectly) wrote about was preceded by more fundamental events, or precursed by fundamental properties that he could not determine. But being an arrogant person, as I can appreciate, Aristotle freely wrote about those properties anyway. Those properties of reality necessarily preceded the actual reality, the physics he sought to describe. The Greek word "ante" means "before." Therefore his musings about pre-physical reality should have been labeled, "antephysics."
But Aristotle's students could hardly have been smarter than the teacher from whom they chose to learn a lot of bullshit. After categorizing his antephysical musings, they published them after his physics stuff. "Meta" is Greek for "after," so those musings became known by their sequential arrangement in ancient literature, rather than from their actual place in the context of ideas.
Greylorn
