id author title date pages extension mime words sentences flesch summary cache txt en-wikipedia-org-1527 Metaphysics - Wikipedia .html text/html 13242 1757 56 Topics of metaphysical investigation include existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility.[4] Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics.[5] While metaphysics may, as a special case, study the entities postulated by fundamental science such as atoms and superstrings, its core topic is the set of categories such as object, property and causality which those scientific theories assume. In a broad sense, process metaphysics is as old as Western philosophy, with figures such as Heraclitus, Plotinus, Duns Scotus, Leibniz, David Hume, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, Charles Renouvier, Karl Marx, Ernst Mach, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Émile Boutroux, Henri Bergson, Samuel Alexander and Nicolas Berdyaev. ./cache/en-wikipedia-org-1527.html ./txt/en-wikipedia-org-1527.txt