Metaphysics does not mean supernatural. It means the questions physics itself cannot ask: why there is a universe of causes at all, and what it is for something to be real.
Popular usage has flattened “metaphysical” into a loose synonym for “spiritual” or “supernatural,” the word stamped on crystal shops and self-help books to signal anything unmeasurable. That usage borrows the word’s aura without its actual content. In philosophy, metaphysics names a specific, rigorous branch of inquiry, not a mood or a genre of retail.
The name is an accident of shelving, not a claim about transcendence. An ancient editor of Aristotle’s works, probably Andronicus of Rhodes, titled fourteen of Aristotle’s books ta meta ta phusika, “the ones after the physics,” meaning only that students should read them after his Physics. Aristotle himself called the subject “first philosophy” and defined its topic as “being qua being” and “first causes”: the most general questions about what exists and why, prior to any particular science’s questions about a specific kind of thing.
Metaphysics is one of philosophy’s core branches, distinct from the others by what it asks. Ethics asks how we should act. Epistemology asks what we can know and how. Logic asks what follows validly from what. Metaphysics asks what is actually there: substances, properties, causation, identity over time, necessity and possibility, the relationship between mind and matter, whether numbers and other abstract objects exist, whether anything exists beyond the physical at all. That last question is a live, contested dispute inside metaphysics, not a settled premise: materialism is itself one metaphysical position, the claim that everything real is ultimately physical, arguing against dualist and idealist alternatives that hold otherwise.
Used correctly, “metaphysical” and “material” name two different registers of description rather than two different vibes. Material description covers what is measurable, physical, and quantifiable. Metaphysical description covers questions about what is real, what grounds what, and what purpose or value consists in, questions that measurement alone cannot settle.
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Metaphysics” (Fall 2025 edition).