Metaphysics

Aristotle's Metaphysics is one of the most studied works of the philosopher, and in the form in which it has come down to us it gathers a set of treatises devoted to what he called "first philosophy", the science of the first principles and causes of reality. The title is not Aristotle's own: it was the editor Andronicus of Rhodes, in the first century BC, who arranged his writings and placed these treatises after those on physics, hence the Greek prefix "meta". Other Aristotelian texts refer to them as the writings "on first philosophy". The date of composition is uncertain, and the order in which the books were written is unknown; the work is thought to stem from lecture notes rather than from a text polished for publication.

The work is made up of books with very varied content, which has led scholars to read it as a heterogeneous collection rather than a closed system. Its main lines are the study of being qua being, the theory of the four causes, the distinction between potentiality and actuality, the analysis of substance, and the reflection on an unmoved first mover, to which Aristotle attributes a thought that thinks itself. Aristotle holds that being is said in many ways and that its study must rest on a common reference to a single principle; this is how ontology can become a science despite the plurality of its uses. Book IV defends principles such as non-contradiction, while books III, IV and VI set out the aporiai, or difficulties, the new science must resolve.

Its reception has been immense. Scholars such as Pierre Aubenque have seen in it an unfinished investigation, which later centuries turned into a unified metaphysical programme. In the Middle Ages it was a decisive source for Arab, Jewish and Christian thinkers, such as Avicenna, Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, and its notion of substance and of God as unmoved mover shaped Western philosophy up to modern times.