Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the study of the world beyond nature or first principles of existence. It is the opposite of dialectics which explain reality and its dynamicity from within it. Metaphysicists in their variety of outlooks have the fundamentally common position of articulating an external principle of existence by which reality abides and is constrained by. Dialecticians on the contrary assert that dynamicity of the totality is grounded in its very own motion rather than a logically prior principle according to which reality operates. Dialectics itself becomes a naturalized position through the development of its very conceptions and logic as explicitly derivative from material reality.

Etymology

The word meta means beyond in Greek, and is today usually used to mean something on something. Physics originally referred to the study of nature in Ancient Greece, which can be understood as the natural world, i.e. the physical, material world in which we live.

Metaphysics, therefore, would refer to the "nature of nature" or something "beyond nature". Metaphysics put simply is the principles of reality itself, its very operational structure. Per dialectical materialism, no conceptuality can grasp this supposed "beyond" precisely because every conceptuality is structured by material existence. Conceptualities developed within material existence are structured by it. Thus what they always grasp is not some operational logical structure of reality which takes primary existence over reality as Platonists and Hegelians would suggest but rather the logical structure is that which is constrained and developed from engagement within material reality.

Historically, especially to Aristotle, metaphysics was the study of the being which is found beyond nature.