Philosophy in Portuguese

The ninth entry is a metafísica, and the English word that matches it letter for letter leads two lives with almost nothing in common. In a philosophy department « metaphysics » is what this list means: the study of what there is and of what sort of thing it is — objects, properties, causes, time. The name began as an accident of shelving, since the treatises placed after the ones on nature were catalogued as ta meta ta physika, the books after the physics, and the label stuck to the subject. Outside the department the adjective went its own way. A « metaphysical » bookshop sells tarot cards, crystals and incense; a « metaphysical » healer works on auras; and in ordinary speech « metaphysical » means vague and otherworldly, so that « this is getting rather metaphysical » is a complaint that an argument has left the ground. The noun kept the discipline and the adjective drifted into the occult. A writer who renders uma questão metafísica as « a metaphysical question » is safe in a seminar and misleading almost everywhere else, where « a question about what exists » says it plainly.