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 Science
AI, artificial mental energy, unintelligent by nature
Machines calculate, but do they understand? Based on the fundamental distinction between reason and intelligence—a distinction overlooked by much of modern thought—this article argues that the term “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer. Current systems do not think, do not understand, and are not free; they harness a new power of computation and simulation. From Kant to Turing, from Leibniz to Jean Borella, this reflection sheds new light on the debates surrounding AI, its dangers, its promises, its energy costs, and its impact on the future of human societies.
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Metaphysics
Descartes the Metaphysician
How should Cartesian philosophy be approached? It is important to emphasize, throughout Descartes’ intellectual journey, the essential role of evidence (évidence), which must be distinguished from mere certainty. It is the indubitability of evidence that enables Descartes to discover the Cogito and to formulate the various “proofs” of God’s existence. Evidence is not a demonstrative procedure that constructs its object; rather, it is an immediate experience of thought through which the mind necessarily submits to a given intellectual content. Consequently, interpretations that reduce Descartes’ philosophy to an onto-theology or to a merely pre-critical enterprise ought to be challenged. One may thus speak of a genuine Cartesian metaphysics, a metaphysics whose inspiration can, in many respects, be traced back to Platonic thought.
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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.
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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