no divine element in our nature and no divine guidance

 We humans are material beings continuous with the rest of the natural world, we have no divine element in our nature and no divine guidance to help us along, and no recourse but to build our understanding of our world on our experience.

Empiricists presume there is only experience; Nativists think there is experience plus innate principles and ideas. If we can account for knowledge without innate ideas, principles, and so on, the Empiricist wins.

Metaphysics, or alternatively ontology, is that branch of philosophy whose special concern is to answer the question ‘What is there?’ These expressions derive from Aristotle, Plato's student. In a collection of his works, the most detailed treatise on the general topic of things that are comes after a treatise on natural things, ta phusika (from which English derives ‘physics’). Since the Greek for ‘after’ is meta, this treatise is titled ‘Metaphysics’. In that work one finds the famous formula that (first) philosophy studies being—the Greek for which is on—qua being. Hence the account of being is ‘ontology’—the English suffix ‘-ology’ signifying ‘study of’: e.g., biology is the study of living things.

ublished Mon Jun 9, 2003; substantive revision Mon Jul 14, 2014

Students of Plato and other ancient philosophers divide philosophy into three parts: Ethics, Epistemology and Metaphysics. While generally accurate and certainly useful for pedagogical purposes, no rigid boundary separates the parts. Ethics, for example, concerns how one ought to live and focuses on pleasure, virtue, and happiness. Since, according to Plato (and Socrates), virtue and happiness require knowledge, e.g., knowledge of goods and evils, Plato's ethics is inseparable from his epistemology. Epistemology is, broadly speaking, the study of what knowledge is and how one comes to have knowledge. Among the many topics included in epistemology are logic, belief, perception, language, science, and knowledge. (‘Science’ derives from the Latin ‘scientia’, which in turn translates the Greek ‘episteme’, from which English derives ‘epistemology’.) Integral to all of these notions is that they (typically) are directed at something. Words refer to something; perception (aesthesis in Greek) involves perceptibles; knowledge requires a known. In this respect, epistemology cannot be investigated without regard to what there is.