Definition of "metaphysic" [met•a•phys•ic]

• Metaphysics. (noun)
• A system of metaphysics. (noun)
• An underlying philosophical or theoretical principle: a belief in luck, the metaphysic of the gambler. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "As Crary notes, "movement and time could be seen and experienced, but never represented" (34), and hence the camera obscura "is inseparable from a certain metaphysic of interiority: it is a figure for both the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world" (39)."
• "A very little reflection will be sufficient to satisfy us that without the aid of conceptions higher than those of sense-experience -- and that is all the word metaphysic means -- it would be absolutely impossible to formulate a single scientific generalisation."
• "The metaphysic of speculative reason is what is commonly called metaphysic in the more limited sense."