This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Although Aristotle did not himself know the word, the term metaphysics was first used after his death by an editor to describe a collection of his writings that we now think of as Aristotle's metaphysics.

Meta means after or beyond, and there is speculation that the editor meant to deter students from reading Aristotle's

metaphysics until after they'd read his physics. But the term is notoriously hard to

define. So when modern philosophers describe themselves as working on metaphysical questions, what exactly do they mean?

A question for leading metaphysician Kit Fine, from New York University.

Kit Fine, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

It's very nice to be here.

Thank you for having me.

The topic we're going to focus on is what is metaphysics.

Now, a simple view of metaphysics is that it's just about

reality, it's the study of reality, is that fair enough?

Almost, it's the philosophical study of reality. Of course many disciplines study reality. Metaphysics is the

philosophical study of reality and of course reality is a big thing. You might think

of it is including everything. So metaphysics is the study of the most

general features of reality. Well so how does that differ from science because for

many people science is the best way we have for discovering anything about the nature of reality, whether it be the size of a planet or the nature of a microorganism.

The main difference from science is that the philosophical study of reality is aproori.

That means that it's independent of observation.

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