The Splitting of Metaphysics in Ontology and Theology
© Tatiana Velitchkov

Metaphysics has been the interest of many philosophers and theologians for a long time including Immanuel Kant (an idealist philosopher), Thomas Aquinas (theologian) and Aristotle (philosopher). Metaphysics itself as a one of the branches of philosophy studies existence, reality and its nature. It deals with, among others, Atheism, objectivism, dualism, idealism, relativism, realism and pluralism. Metaphysics was originally divided into cosmology and ontology. Cosmology dealt with the universe as a whole, its origin and nature.

Aristotle extinguished metaphysics branches into three namely, Ontology, Natural Theology and Universal Science. According to him, Ontology dealt with the things that exist on the earth, what they possess in terms of their characteristics and how they change. Theology dealt mostly with issues relating to religion; God, divinity, creation among others. Universal science dealt the issues of first principles, which are the basic or first descriptions you give to an object or entity.

Thomas Aquinas too thought the subject could be better dealt with in three parts; metaphysical, theology and what he referred to as prima philosophy until the major splitting of the subject into two was made by Christian Wolff. Other philosophers such as Kant and Edmund Husserl gave their versions too but they revolved around the distinctions made by earlier philosophers.

Wolff is probably the one who came up with general and special metaphysics. Ontology is included in general metaphysics while Theology is included in special metaphysics. General metaphysics deals with all things generally while special metaphysics deals with a single being. Since theology deals with religious issues it is thus considered special metaphysics.

In Ontology one would try to answer such questions as the meaning of existence and its characteristics, entities and their relation to each other, fundamental entities, entity properties, physical and non-physical properties of entities, how objects are identified and many more. Most ontological studies revolve around realism, empiricism, positivism and post-modernism.

Theology is the field dealing religion, that is, existence and nature of god (s) and the relationship of the god or gods to the universe. Theological studies attempt to answer questions such as how many gods exist if any, religious beliefs and their relationship to faith, revelation and reason, whether there is anything like divine intervention and the issues of miracles, prayers and evil in the universe. Theological studies revolve around subjects like theism, deism, monotheism and polytheism, atheism or humanism, pantheism, agnosticism and fideism. Earlier on theology was based on rationality in that it took a rational approach to the study of God, humans and the universe.

The splitting of metaphysics into general and special was still disputed by other philosophers who had different views from Wolff such as David Hume and Kant who did come up with their own classes of metaphysics based on Wolff’s.

This video is Part1 of 18 parts by physicist and consciousness researcher, Thomas Campbell, in which he discusses the nature of reality in terms of consciousness and more.