Wolfgang Smith for Everyone
Bruno Bérard und Marie-José Jolivet (herausgegeben von) 2026
Metaphysics is the science that questions the beyond of the physical world. It is about answering, for example, Leibniz’s question: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” or to understand Plato saying that all cosmology can only be “a probable myth (ton eikota mython)”, because it is, “of all necessity the image of something” (Timaeus, 29b, 29d). It is this something, this necessary source of things that metaphysics sets out to reveal.
Latest Publications
Two Categories of Works
If our science of nature remains hypothetical, it is not because of the weakness of our intelligence; it is because of a lack of reality in the object to be known. The ultimate reality of the universe is in its “beyond”: metaphysical science begins where physical science is forced to stop. The essential constraint of physics is in the constitution of its object of study: the physical. And while metaphysical questions often emerge in the study of the physical—from astrophysics to quantum mechanics—the physical sciences are not equipped to engage such questions. This is just one reason why we need metaphysics.
Recent Articles
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Metaphilosophy: The Three Modes of Philosophizing
What does it mean to philosophize? To seek the truth, to contemplate it, or to formulate it? Drawing on an insight of Jean Borella, this article argues that the philosophical act comprises three inseparable dimensions: interrogation, contemplation, and formulation. Every great philosophy is shaped by the tension among these three modes, sometimes privileging one at the expense of the others. Such a perspective opens the way to a genuine metaphilosophy: no longer a particular doctrine, but a reflection on the very nature of philosophizing itself.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Metaphysics: The Third Way
The modern distinction between secular philosophy and confessional theology, consistent with the contemporary episteme, tends to impose a restrictive alternative between two forms of metaphysics. Yet these are by no means mutually exclusive: any genuine metaphysics, insofar as it seeks the intelligibility of the whole, cannot be confined within the limits of discursive reason alone.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Feminism, Otherwise
Can we conceive a feminism that is neither ideological nor merely reactive? An unexpected reading! In just a few pages, we encounter a rediscovered feminism—from ecofeminism to Plato, from Virginia Woolf to Simone Weil—culminating in a renewed understanding of the feminine as a power of truth. This is precisely the book’s wager: from the lived body in Maurice Merleau-Ponty to the figure of Diotima in Plato, it seeks to uncover a metaphysics of the feminine that has largely gone unnoticed.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Meeting with Jean Grondin: The Beauty of Metaphysics
In this interview, Jean Grondin reflects on the enduring presence of metaphysics despite modern critiques and proposes its refoundation from both historical and conceptual perspectives. Drawing on its Greek sources—Plato and Aristotle—he highlights its fundamental role as a search for meaning, beauty, and first principles. The dialogue also explores its contemporary developments, particularly through hermeneutics, as well as its relationship to theology, spiritual traditions, and the challenges of the modern world. What emerges is a conception of metaphysics as an open and inexhaustible dialogue on the meaning of things and… The beauty of metaphysics.
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Metaphysics and Philosophy
Meeting with Bruno Bérard: Metaphysics for Everyone
This interview offers a critical assessment of the contemporary status of metaphysics, characterized by its institutional dispersion and its frequent reduction to historical or analytical expressions. Against this dilution, Bruno Bérard reasserts its principial scope by grounding it in three converging indices: the requirement of a first cause, the irreducibility of meaning to discursive rationality alone, and the persistence of revealed contents within spiritual traditions. Metaphysics is thereby restored to its status as first philosophy, oriented toward a supra-rational intelligence of reality that exceeds the limits of modern ontology and epistemology.
Metafysikós is the transliteration of modern Greek μεταφυσικός ; ancient Greek metaphusika gave the Latin metaphysica.
About this website
This site has the ambition to make accessible to most people a metaphysical science which, freed from too many scientific or philosophical complexities, becomes easy to understand. Different books and articles, written with the aim of facilitating access, are thus presented one by one and a glossary of the few inevitable technical words has been established to make the approach even easier.
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