Aristotle's definition of "man" as rational animal. — Metaphysician Undercover

... spelled "Meta-Physics", and defined as the science of the non-physical. 

Does any of that make sense to you? — Gnomon

... why would you accept Fooloso4's assessment that for Aristotle there are no independent forms? — Metaphysician Undercover

Fooloso4's statement — Metaphysician Undercover

act in harmony with your nature — wonderer1

My question wasn't rhetorical, as if to argue either an absolute ethic or nihilism. I was asking why it's not a dichotomy. — Hanover

What you find hateful [harmful], do not do to anyone.

What then makes ethical realism intelligible? — Hanover

Without ethical realism, how do you avoid nihilism?

You've got a few choices here with your secular humanism: (1) accept a subjective morality but chase the elusive idea that your there are universal subjective truths (which there aren't), (2) use secular terms to appease yourself that you're not actually a theist, or (3) accept the nihilism inherent in the position — Hanover

This system of belief is not beholden to rational thought ... — Noble Dust

[ ... ] Wheeler conceived of information, not as non-physical, but as "a fundamental physical entity"!

@Gnomon :point: You also might want to read this to educate yourself as to the diversity of views on the matter of information.

This is nice apt summation:

According to Aristotle biological beings are a single physical entity. There are no separate forms and hyle floating around waiting to be combined. There is not one without the other, substantiated in living physical entities, that is, substances.
— Fooloso4 — Janus

If the mental cannot be explained in terms of the physical then the physical cannot be explained in terms of the mental. — Fooloso4

But the point of the hard problem of consciousness argument is precisely that no amount of objective analysis can capture the first-person experience. — Wayfarer

Negentropy decreases entropy.... — Pantagruel

You can choose to accept pluralism, like William James and simply marvel at the multifaceted aspects of the world - this is valuable and instructive especially in terms of aesthetic appreciation. But it won't get you far, it seems to me to stop the search for underlying principles — Manuel

The brain is part of an organism. Physicalism need not be reductive physicalism. The recognition that a living organism can be conscious, is not reductive. To look at an organism as a whole is not reductive physicalism. To claim that consciousness must come from elsewhere because a physical explanation must be reductive is misguided. — Fooloso4

How do you respond to the claim that science is founded on a metaphysical position - that reality can be understood? — Tom Storm

Or do you view science as being less totalising than this claim and more tentative in its approach?

So, yes, metaphysics isn't modern science, because it attempts to go beyond some of the limits of modern science. — Pantagruel

So in that sense noumena and phenomena can be understood to be the same thing seen under the two different aspects: in-themselves and as-they-appear.

I remember reading somewhere that there are two schools of thought among Kant scholars: the dual world theorists and the dual aspect theorists. — Janus

As the Buddha travelled around delivering his teachings, he gathered many followers who set aside their worldly life to follow him.

One of these men was an intellectual named Malunkyaputra, who had been inspired by the Buddha’s deep insight. However, Malunkyaputra eventually grew frustrated with the Buddha, who seems to have avoided answering basic metaphysical questions, like “is there an afterlife?” and other grasping at understanding the universe its purposes.

One day Malunkyaputra confronted the Buddha about it, and declared that, unless the Buddha answered his questions, Malunkyaputra would give up the Buddhist life and return to his old life within society.

The Buddha responded with a story:

Suppose a man has been shot with a poison arrow. His friends and family that were with him rush to call a doctor to remove the arrow and administer an antidote to the poison. But, before they’re able to, the man who was shot stops them, shouting “I will not let this arrow be removed until I know — who shot me? How tall was he? Of what material was his bow made?”

Then the Buddha asked Malunkyaputra what he thought of the man in his story, who refused treatment for his injury until his questions about the man that shot him were answered. Malunkyaputra responded: “He is a fool — his questions are not relevant to treating his injury, and he will die before he gets them answered.”

“Similarly,” said the Buddha, “I do not teach whether or not there is an afterlife and what it is like and such. I teach only how to remove the arrow of your suffering, by revealing its origin, and the Eightfold Path to its end.”

No object without subject. — Wayfarer

As I remember it (it's a while since I read the book) Pierre Hadot in Philosophy as a Way of Life understands the various ancient Greek philosophical systems as sets of ideas designed to live by, not consisting of claims to be critiqued and argued over. Philosophy under that conception has a different purpose: to provide ways of living designed to free practitioners from the unruly desires, petty concerns, existential anxieties, and worldly attachments that can make life a misery.

A modern equivalent would be Cognitive Behavior Therapy or Gestalt Therapy: if you undertake that practice, you are not there to argue about their different metaphysical or phenomenological claims, but rather to accept the set of ideas that constitute the therapy and practice in accordance with them to (hopefully) gain the result.

So, as Hadot points out Stoicism, Skepticism, Cynicism, Epicureanism, Platonism and Neoplatonism all had very different sets of metaphysical ideas, but they were all similar in there status as philosophical and ethical practices designed to live in better ways. Epicureanism, for example, explicitly rejects the idea of afterlife.

So, I don't think you can cite Hadot to support any contention that it was the metaphysical ideas in the ancient philosophies that were of primary importance: it is more likely that such ideas were as diverse within the systems as were the different kinds of people with their different mindsets, that they sought to attract. — Janus

Although I will also observe that yours is not a physicalist account of physicalism. — Wayfarer

Physicalism is a paradigm for generating conjectures or models and not a theoretical explanation of phenomena. — 180 Proof