Metaphysics: Reality, Being and Causality
Metaphysics: Reality, Being and Causality
This domain asks what exists, what it means to be, and how events are causally connected. The exam tests your grasp of basic metaphysical positions and your ability to analyse a causal claim.
Core rules
- Ontology studies being and categories of existence; metaphysics also examines substance, property, relation, identity, change and causation.
- Monism holds that reality is one kind of thing; dualism admits two; pluralism admits many. Materialism and idealism are competing answers about the basic stuff of reality.
- Aristotle’s four causes are material (what it is made of), formal (its structure), efficient (what produces it), and final (its purpose).
- Causality can be understood as constant conjunction, necessary connection, or causal mechanism. Determinism says every event is caused; free will debates ask whether moral responsibility survives determinism.
- Realism affirms mind-independent reality; idealism makes reality dependent on mind or experience.
Worked example
A clay pot: its material cause is clay, its formal cause is the pot’s shape, its efficient cause is the potter’s action, and its final cause is storing water. If someone says ‘the pot exists because we perceive it’, that is an idealist claim, not an account of its efficient cause.
Traps
Do not confuse a cause with a correlation; do not reduce all causes to efficient causes; and do not treat determinism as automatically denying free will. Define ‘substance’ before using it.