vectorcube said:
The prefix "meta" also means "the study of". So, to say " metaphilosophy" is the study of " the study of the nature of philosophy". When you write about "meta-level". I know instantly that it is not part of analytic philosophy, mathematics, or linquistic. It is probable a make up word from you.
Meta- is another example of how there is a deep schism in modern thought - the one that you and I stand on opposite sides of.
Meta originally meant "after" or "beyond". It was a natural hierarchical notion. You need to step back in some sense to see the place where you were standing. In philosophy, this was generalising, abstracting, universalising.
And essentially this is a change in scale. A move upwards from the local to some perspective more global. The details or particulars are shed so that the generals or principles are more sharply seen.
So meta- was about stepping back to the wider view, back towards generality.
But there is a strong mood of atomism within western thought. Scale was one of the key things to get jettisoned from all modelling. And we can see this happening here for example with the attempts to make meta- also self-referential. The general suddenly is taken to be also an example of a particular itself. It is no longer something different (in scale) but also now reduced to something itself of the same scale.
What was a clear dichotomy (particular~general, local~global, event~context) is instead now treated as a monad. The general is collapsed to the status of "just another" particular. It is the same thinking that justifies treating worlds as objects that can be ensembled. Formed into disconnected collections.
So yes, instantly you should know that I am using meta- in a sense now antithetical to the branches of philosophy you study. And one truer to its original philosopical sense.
If these are matters you want to discuss, here are some snips from your preferred souce to consider first...
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/
In Metaphysics A.1...These causes and principles are clearly the subject matter of what he calls ‘first philosophy’. But this does not mean the branch of philosophy that should be studied first. Rather, it concerns issues that are in some sense the most fundamental
or at the highest level of generality. Aristotle distinguished between things that are “better known to us” and things that are “better known in themselves,”[1] and maintained that we should begin our study of a given topic with things better known to us and arrive ultimately at an understanding of things better known in themselves. The principles studied by ‘first philosophy’ may seem very general and abstract, but they are, according to Aristotle, better known in themselves, however remote they may seem from the world of ordinary experience. Still, since they are to be studied only by one who has already studied nature (which is the subject matter of the Physics), they are quite appropriately described as coming “after the Physics.”...
...in Book B, Aristotle delineates his subject matter in a different way, by listing the problems or perplexities (aporiai) he hopes to deal with. Characteristic of these perplexities, he says, is that they tie our thinking up in knots. They include the following, among others: Are sensible substances the only ones that exist, or are there others besides them? Is it kinds or individuals that are the elements and principles of things? And if it is kinds, which ones: the most generic or the most specific? Is there a cause apart from matter? Is there anything apart from material compounds? Are the principles limited, either in number or in kind? Are the principles of perishable things themselves perishable?
Are the principles universal or particular, and do they exist potentially or actually? Are mathematical objects (numbers, lines, figures, points) substances? If they are, are they separate from or do they always belong to sensible things? And (“the hardest and most perplexing of all,” Aristotle says) are unity and being the substance of things, or are they attributes of some other subject?
...To understand the problems and project of Aristotle's Metaphysics, it is best to begin with one of his earlier works, the Categories...
...The language of this contrast (‘in’ a subject vs. ‘said of’ a subject) is peculiar to the Categories, but the idea seems to recur in other works as the distinction between accidental vs. essential predication. Similarly, in works other than the Categories, Aristotle uses the label ‘universals’ (ta katholou) for the things that are “said of many;” things that are not universal he calls ‘particulars’ (ta kath’ hekasta). Although he does not use these labels in the Categories,
it is not misleading to say that the doctrine of the Categories is that each category contains a hierarchy of universals and particulars, with each universal being ‘said of’ the lower-level universals and particulars that fall beneath it. Each category thus has the structure of an upside-down tree.[2] At the top (or trunk) of the tree are the most generic items in that category[3] (e.g., in the case of the category of substance, the genus plant and the genus animal); branching below them are universals at the next highest level, and branching below these are found lower levels of universals, and so on, down to the lowest level universals (e.g., such infimae species as man and horse); at the lowest level — the leaves of the tree — are found the individual substances, e.g., this man, that horse, etc...