The history of metaphysics coincides with the history of Western thought itself. In its broadest sense, it is the study of “Being as such”. However, each one of the doctrines or moments of reflection that were dedicated to this investigation covered it with new questions and privileged objects. Described in its classical origins as an investigation into how sensitive the climax of all other sciences' efforts would be (“Aristotelian moment”), metaphysical investigations later became close to theology and the fundamental regulatory knowledge (“Thomistic moment”). Then, it is constituted as an independent knowledge, whose connection with theology then consists in providing it with the fundamental bases ("Suarez moment"). In early modern times, metaphysics progressively dissociates itself from theology and is located, from a methodological point of view, "before" and no longer "after" physics as the basis of all knowledge ("Cartesian moment”). The success of modern natural philosophy questions the principles under which metaphysics has hitherto been set and, for this reason, physics becomes the methodological model for a metaphysics that can be presented as a science (“critical moment”). Due to the pairing of the other sciences with the "experimental method" and its incompatibility with any supersensible knowledge, metaphysics, as an area of ​​questioning, becomes a “non-scientific”, i.e. a “irrational” or mere “superstition” (“positivist moment”). With the proliferation of the historical school and its unconditional defence of the relativity of all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, metaphysics becomes an artifact of culture, a reliquary of opinions which even they might seem interesting, they cannot be subject to a rational investigation.

 

Despite this, several original and influential studies in contemporary thought were guided by metaphysical questions while some studies aim to return to them, others to challenge them, but all of them aim to rethink metaphysical questions. Such would be the case, for example, of the following works: Creative Evolution (H. Bergson), Essays in Radical Empiricism (W. James), Logical Investigations (E. Husserl), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus / Philosophical Investigations (L. Wittgenstein), Being and Time (M. Heidegger), Process and Reality (N. Whitehead), Being and Nothingness (JP. Sartre), Phenomenology of Perception (M. Ponty), Truth and Method (H. Gadamer), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (R. Rorty), Word and Object (W. Quine), Difference and Repetition (G. Deleuze), Of Grammatology (J. Derrida), among many others. In addition to the interest for those who study these topics directly, the repercussion of these works in various areas (literature, linguistics, psychology, law, biology, etc.) attests that the issues here addressed are not only undoubtedly related to culture, but it also reshapes culture.

 

Metaphysics, as a common thread of the history of philosophy itself, consists of a privileged field to study both the origins of Western thought (through the resumption of its most important authors and its impact on science and culture) and the critical development of contemporary ontologies in their interactions with different types of knowledge.

 

Lines of Research:

 

Origins of Western Thought

Study of the ontological issues in the origins of the Western thought through the combination of interdisciplinary themes and methods, focusing mainly on investigations of the meanings of being in its historical development and in its relations with the scientific, political and cultural knowledge of the classical era.

  

Contemporary Ontologies

Study of ontological issues in contemporary thought by the combination of interdisciplinary themes and methods, with emphasis on the discussion about the meaning of “being as such” (explicit or underlying scientific, political and cultural knowledge).

• 13/07/2020