JMG, The Metaphysics of Money

That meant, among other things, that the labels assigned to his treatises by that anonymous Alexandrian savant became the basic categories of scholarship in the Middle Ages. (Most of them remain basic categories today, which is why your local university has departments of physics, meteorology, and so on.) Metaphysics was no exception, and the philosophical issues Aristotle tackled in that treatise have carried that label ever since.

Those issues are what Aristotle himself called “first philosophy:” an analysis of the basic terms that have to be sorted out before any kind of philosophy can be sure of its foundations. The medieval scholars who blew the dust off Aristotle’s treatise, however, interpreted his work in their own way, which meant that the basic issues of philosophy were redefined in terms of Christian, Muslim, or Jewish theology. By the time the 18th century rolled around, metaphysics as a discipline was almost entirely identified with the theological basis given it by the scholars of the Middle Ages, and so it got dropped like a hot potato as secularism swept the academic world.

Not quite -- metaphysics for Aristotle was not really the same as the modern quest for certain knowledge. (Although in the 19th century, some Catholics attempted tried to reorient metaphysics as a way of answering modern epistemological questions. Even today there may be courses on epistemology and criteriology at European universities.) Did metaphysics die because of its association with Christianity and theology? Or because of the influence of Kant's idealism instead?

I agree with Mr. Greer that part of the problem with the sciences (both traditional sciences and pseudo-sciences) is that many of their practioners claim that certainty can only come with quantification and mathematical formulae. The problem is not the loss of metaphysics (though the consequences of that are serious), but the truncation of the other sciences (used in the Aristotelian sense) and the confusion between speculative and practical science.