Metaphysics is a division of philosophy that is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being and includes such items as ontology, cosmology, and often epistemology

Ontology – is a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being.

Cosmology – is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of the universe.

Epistemology – is the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.

Topics of metaphysical investigation include existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics.

According to the Metaphysics Research Lab at Stanford University,

The word and concept of Metaphysics.

The word ‘metaphysics’ is notoriously hard to define. Twentieth-century coinages like ‘meta-language’ and ‘metaphilosophy’ encourage the impression that metaphysics is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study devoted to matters that transcend the mundane concerns of Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken. The word ‘metaphysics’ is derived from a collective title of the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think of as making up Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aristotle himself did not know the word. (He had four names for the branch of philosophy that is the subject-matter of Metaphysics: ‘first philosophy’, ‘first science’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘theology’.) At least one hundred years after Aristotle’s death, an editor of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of Rhodes) titled those fourteen books “Ta meta ta phusika”— “the after the physicals” or “the ones after the physical ones”. The “physical ones” being the books contained in what we now call Aristotle’s Physics. The title was probably meant to warn students of Aristotle’s philosophy that they should attempt Metaphysics only after they had mastered “the physical ones”, the books about nature or the natural world. That is to say, about change, for change is the defining feature of the natural world.

If metaphysics now considers a wider range of problems than those studied in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, those original problems continue to belong to its subject-matter. For instance, the topic of “being as such” (and “existence as such”, if existence is something other than being) is one of the matters that belong to metaphysics on any conception of metaphysics.

 [1] van Inwagen, Peter and Meghan Sullivan, “Metaphysics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/metaphysics/&gt;.