Check out this lecture from last year:

http://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/The%20Vindication%20of%20St%20Thomas%207-14-14.pdf

I just stumbled across this great lecture from last year on the revenge of the metaphysics of Aristotle/Aquinas. It is making a comeback as I have personally experienced. He does also address Hume and the theories of causality.

A quote:

"In 1990 James Ross published one of his typical papers, both zany and perspicacious, entitled “The Fate of the Analysts: Aristotle’s Revenge." The paper contains a powerful argument for the claim that the advance of natural science in the 20th century has exposed as woefully inadequate the substitutes for an Aristotelian philosophy of nature and philosophical anthropology that were invented by 17th and 18th century philosophers."

Why do the textbooks I have on metaphysics always present more than one opinion regarding every issue? Why don't they just weed through and present the "metaphysical truth"?

Has Hume been proved right or wrong about causation?

If this is hinting towards a belief that "because people debate about which metaphysical understanding is most true, therefore metaphysics can't come to any real truth", then this is obviously not a good argument. Every area of study, including the physical sciences themselves, would be destroyed by this type of thinking.

Now, if someone asks the question--why is there so much debate over metaphysics and philosophical topics in general right now?--I believe there are a lot of things at work, but here are a few:

1) Many people have not been trained how to do metaphysics, and philosophy in general, well over the past 50-75 years or so.

Part of this is philosophy has become too specialized; you first need to learn how to think critically using philosophy starting with the general big questions and principles, and then move to the more specific questions. Now those in college take a very specific course as part of core classes and they get "the tree" without seeing "the forest". But without the forest, you have no clue if you are talking about the tree correctly or coherently. This is very different from science, so part of it may be that many just don't know how to think in this way.

2) Because of the great advances in the modern sciences over the past 100-200 years, there has been an emphasis on them at the expense of other valid disciplines. Sometimes people want to reduce everything to the physical sciences, which is a recipe for intellectual suicide! (And why many brilliant scientists end up making ridiculous metaphysical/philosophical claims!)

3) Every single person is a "philosopher" insofar as people can't stop doing philosophy. Every decision and action a person partakes in has a philosophical/metaphysical assumption underlying it, and many people are completely oblivious to these assumptions and how to figure out if it is even a valid underlying belief.

If you put (1) and (2) together, this means that people start doing philosophy with science, because it is what they know and they don't know how to think critically using philosophy. This again is a recipe for disaster and intellectual suicide!

[On Hume--I personally believe, along with many others, that Hume's theory of causation is, beyond a reasonable doubt, false. One reason being that it cannot support a coherent physical science. In short, if science is coherent, then Hume's version of causality is false.]

So is Aristotelian/Thomist metaphysics "true"? If so, why say science is contingent on metaphysics? Why not say science is contingent on Aristotelian/Thomist metaphysics?

For any knowledge, the best explanation is the one that is the most consistent (with all the relevant data), most coherent (with itself), and most comprehensive (explains the most). This is what we judge any sort of scientific theory or belief in general.

It is the same for a philosophical/metaphysical theory. I have found, along with a long list of people from about 1200AD to even the present day that the A-T metaphysics does all three of these the best out of any system we've come across. I am speaking here of A-T metaphysics in the most general sense (that is, that the underlying structure of physical reality exhibits formal, final, efficient, and material "causality", and is subject to actuality and potency), and I'm definitely not speaking about A-T physics/biology (which much of it is wrong).

This doesn't mean I believe that A-T is the end all, be all. In fact, I'm sure I make small modifications to what Aristotle and Aquinas have said. There will always be more clarifications that can be made, because we will never have complete knowledge here on earth in regards to any area of knowledge.

not quite.

So much for free will.

A metaphysical view therefore can be true or false based upon the
epistemological principles of consistency, coherency, and explanatory
power.

So is Aristotelian/Thomist metaphysics "true"? If so, why say science is contingent on metaphysics? Why not say science is contingent on Aristotelian/Thomist metaphysics?

Has Hume been proved right or wrong about causation? Why do the textbooks I have on metaphysics always present more than one opinion regarding every issue? Why don't they just weed through and present the "metaphysical truth"?

What do you consider five basic truths of metaphysics?

Hey David,

I am a little confused by the above.

Metaphysics seeks to describe the underlying structure of reality as it actually exists. A metaphysical view therefore can be true or false based upon the epistemological principles of consistency, coherency, and explanatory power.

Metaphysics does not use the "scientific method", it is its own study and has its own method. It looks at reality empirically and then reasons abstractly about what is necessary for these things to exist and act as they do right now.

Metaphysics is a more primary way of studying reality than science because it studies being as being. In the end, science and metaphysics are, and should be, harmonious. If there is a true contradiction, either our metaphysics or scientific conclusion is wrong, or our understanding of one, or both, of those is wrong.

I think what has happened since the enlightenment is that Science has
been so successful in many fields that we wonder why it hasn't confirmed
anything like a state of affairs that most religious claim is true. The
existence of an afterlife, a realm of angels demons and deities that
interact with the cosmos in intelligible purposeful ways.

I am always mystified by this line of thought because it is equal to saying, "Why is this infrared sensor not picking up any x-rays?" It must be because x-rays don't exist.

This makes it very clear that only unless one begins by assuming science is the only tool to discover truth about the entirety of reality will one be able to hold that the things that science doesn't discover don't exist. (Which is like assuming that the infrared sensor is the only way to discover all wavelengths of all electromagnetic spectrum.)

i think i know what you mean. i did not choose to be here and yet i am told that i will live forever!

Maybe life in general.