Concept
Theory of everything (philosophy)
Overview
In philosophy, a theory of everything (ToE) is an ultimate, all-encompassing explanation or description of nature or reality. It aspires to answer the most fundamental questions: why there is anything at all, why reality is intelligible, and why the laws of nature take the form they do. The term, borrowed from physics, where the search for a final unifying framework is ongoing, has been adopted by philosophers to discuss both the viability of such a project and the properties a completed explanation would need to possess. A philosophical ToE is not a single equation but a comprehensive conceptual structure that integrates metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of science into a coherent whole.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Most of the earliest philosophers have placed the principles of everything in something in the form of matter (_ἐν ὕλης εἴδει_), for, that from which everything existent comes, and out of which it takes its origin as its first source, and into which it finally sinks, as substance (_οὐσία_), ever remains the same and only changes in its particular qualities (_πάθεσι_); and this is called the element (_στοιχεῖον_) and…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Theory of everything is; the author is tied to Theory of everything in the knowledge graph.
Any such select set is called the set of postulates, or premises, from which the reasoning proceeds. The reasoning is nothing else than the exhibition of the whole pattern of general conditions involved in the pattern derived from the selected postulates.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
States what Theory of everything is; the author is tied to Theory of everything in the knowledge graph.
Psychology then deals with a real, which exhibits phenomena analogous in several respects to those discussed by statics and mechanics. Its foundation is a statics and mechanics of the Soul,—as this real is called. We begin by presupposing as the ultimate reality, underlying the factitious and generally imperfect unity of self-consciousness and mind, an essential and primary unity—the unity of an absolutely simple or…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
States what Theory of everything is; the author is tied to Theory of everything in the knowledge graph.
Related ideas
- Absolute idealism
- Principle of sufficient reason
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Philosophy
- Feminist epistemology
- Process and Reality
- Karl Popper
- Mind–body dualism
- Ken Wilber
- Metaphysics
- Stoicism
- Monism
- Stephen Hawking
- Monadology
- Richard Rorty
- Thomas Aquinas
- Nature
- Physics
- Plato
- Neoplatonism
- Process philosophy
- P. F. Strawson
- Herbert Spencer
Place in the tradition
Part of Outline of metaphysics.
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