Metaphysics, Realism & Ontology

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Abstractions about what exists and how reality relates to mind, matter, experience, and knowledge. They include realism and anti-realism, materialism and idealism, substance and emanation, constructivism, indeterminism, ethical form, and weak or transcendental ontology.

23 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Anti-realism — A family of philosophical positions rejecting truth or existence as wholly independent of epistemic access, conceptual scheme, or discourse.
• Antihumanism — A family of philosophical and social-theoretical critiques rejecting a universal, autonomous or foundational human essence as the basis of explanation and normativity.
• Cartesianism — The philosophical system and historical tradition deriving from Descartes, centered on methodological doubt, rational foundations, mind–body distinction, mechanistic nature, and mathematical explanation.
• Egocentric presentism — A metaphysical view that acknowledges other conscious perspectives while holding that the present first-person perspective has a uniquely fundamental intrinsic status.
• Emanationism — A metaphysical-cosmological doctrine in which all levels of reality proceed necessarily from a first principle through successively mediated and diminished derivations.
• Formal ethics — Represent consistency constraints on moral judgments in a modal–deontic logical system while leaving substantive moral content underdetermined.
• Indeterminism — The view that at least some events are not uniquely fixed by prior state and governing laws.
• Intuition (Bergson) — Henri Bergson's philosophical method of entering sympathetically into a thing's duration and qualitative movement rather than reconstructing it through external analysis and symbols.
• Katalepsis — The Stoic epistemic state of securely grasping a truth through assent to a cognitive impression that could not arise from what is false.
• Lightness (philosophy) — An existential and aesthetic concept of freedom from weight, obligation or recurrence, often paired with heaviness to explore meaning, commitment and the burden or insignificance of a single life.
• Logical positivism — A twentieth-century empiricist movement that joined formal logic to scientific philosophy and treated empirical verifiability or analytic truth as the criterion of cognitive meaning, while revising that program under sustained internal criticism.
• Materialism — A metaphysical position holding that matter or physical processes are fundamental and that minds and other phenomena depend on them.
• Noumenon — In Kantian philosophy, an object considered independently of the conditions of sensible intuition, functioning as a limiting contrast to phenomena rather than an object of empirical knowledge.
• Participation (philosophy) — A metaphysical relation in which a particular or dependent being has a form, property or reality through an asymmetric dependence on what it participates in.
• Philosophical realism — The stance that entities of a specified kind exist or have facts independently of minds, conceptual schemes, language, or acts of knowing.
• Physicalism — The metaphysical thesis that everything is physical or wholly determined by the physical.
• Radical constructivism — An epistemology treating knowledge as viable organization of experience rather than verifiable correspondence with a mind-independent world.
• Schema (Kant) — A time-structured rule by which Kant’s imagination mediates between a pure category and sensible appearances.
• Substance theory — An ontological theory in which enduring particulars or substrata bear properties while remaining distinct from those properties.
• Transcendental idealism — Kant’s doctrine that objects of experience appear under a priori forms and categories supplied by cognition, while things in themselves are not thereby known.
• Transcendental theology — Kant's name for attempts to cognize a supreme being through pure reason, divided into ontotheology from concepts alone and cosmotheology from general experience of a world.
• Tychism — Charles S. Peirce’s metaphysical doctrine that objective chance is irreducible and active in the evolution of laws and the universe.
• Weak ontology (political concept) — Make political theory's basic claims about human being and world explicit while holding them as historically situated, contestable commitments rather than unrevisable metaphysical foundations.