Metaphysics

Fourteen books on existence as such, which Aristotle did not name and may never have meant as one work.

English, a translation held here, and your language

First published: 340 BCE(aged 44)
Original language: Ancient Greek

Overview

Avicenna wrote that he had read this book through and knew it by heart without following a line of it, and that what finally opened it for him was a short work of al-Farabi's. Part of the difficulty is that it is not one book: fourteen lettered books stand under the title, and they include a glossary of philosophical terms, a survey of earlier thinkers, at least one stretch that ancient readers thought belonged to somebody else, and, at the centre, the treatment of substance around which the rest is arranged. Aristotle's own name for the enquiry is first philosophy — the study of being simply as being, rather than as living or moving or countable, and behind that the question of what it takes for something to be a this at all rather than a heap of stuff that happens to be together. His answer works through form and matter, and through potentiality and actuality: an acorn and an oak are the same thing at different stages of being what it is. The argument arrives at a mover that causes all motion without moving, by being what everything else wants, and spends eternity thinking about thinking. Whether the fourteen books were ever meant to sit together is a separate question, and an old one. W. D. Ross thought it was never a finished work — some books cohering, others dropped into position by later editors. The title is a symptom of the same thing. In the arrangement of the corpus that goes back to Andronicus of Rhodes, these treatises came after the Physics and were referred to as the ones after the physics. A filing note is now the name of a discipline.

Key concepts

Why does Aristotle call this inquiry first philosophy?

Aristotle calls it first philosophy because it seeks the first principles and causes that every other science presupposes. Biology can explain living things and mathematics countable objects, but neither science establishes what it means for anything to be. The inquiry therefore asks what must be true before specialised explanations can begin.

How do Aristotle’s four causes explain a thing completely?

The four causes explain a thing through its matter, form, source of change, and end. Bronze answers what a statue is made from; its shape answers what makes it that statue; the sculptor accounts for its production; and its function explains what the statue is for. One cause alone leaves the explanation unfinished.

How do potentiality and actuality explain change without making opposites identical?

Potentiality names a real capacity to become or do something, while actuality names that capacity fulfilled. An acorn can become an oak without already being an oak in the same way; the tree actualises what the seed could be. Change therefore moves between genuine states rather than arising from absolute nothing.

Why must Aristotle’s first cause cause without itself moving?

Aristotle’s first cause must cause motion without moving because an endless chain of movers would never explain why motion occurs at all. The unmoved mover produces motion as an object of desire or thought, not by pushing another body. It remains eternally actual, since any unrealised capacity would require a further cause.

What does Aristotle mean by thinking thinking?

Thinking thinking names the unmoved mover’s activity: thought whose object is thought itself. Aristotle gives this activity perfect actuality because it contains no unrealised capacity and depends on nothing outside itself. Human thought shifts between objects and tasks; the first cause instead sustains an eternal act of self-knowing thought.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Being as Being

What makes something a genuine this rather than a heap of matter, and what principles explain its being? The answer determines whether knowledge can reach beyond changing appearances to the structures that make things intelligible.

Aristotle calls this enquiry first philosophy: it studies being simply as being, not merely as living, moving, or countable. Substance anchors the account, while form and matter explain what a thing is and potentiality and actuality explain how it can change without becoming unrelated to itself. An acorn and an oak mark different stages of one being. The argument finally reaches a mover that causes motion without moving, eternally thinking about thinking.

metaphysics
ontology
substance
essence
form
matter
potentiality
actuality
motion
first principles
teleology
change
nature
causation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 384
distinct concepts: 375
by passages held, corpus-wide: #193

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “forms” and “substance”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
forms	substance	23
definition	essence	17
essence	substance	15
substance	unity	15
forms	number	14
number	unity	14
definition	substance	13
first principles	number	13
causation	forms	11
first principles	substance	11
forms	unity	10
causation	first principles	9
essence	forms	8
number	substance	8
causation	essence	6
causation	number	6
causation	substance	6
definition	forms	6
definition	unity	4
essence	unity	4
first principles	forms	4
first principles	unity	4
causation	definition	3
essence	number	3
causation	unity	2
definition	number	2
essence	first principles	2
definition	first principles	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

-350 The Organon, or Logical Treatises, of Aristotle (Ὄργανον)
The medieval schools came at these six through Porphyry's Isagoge. The rest of the corpus simply uses them: the Physics, the Metaphysics and the biological works take the syllogism and the ten kinds as given.
EN
-345 Eudemian Ethics
One of three ethical treatises transmitted under Aristotle's name, alongside the Nicomachean Ethics and the Magna Moralia — the last of the three being the one whose authenticity is disputed.
EN
-340 Metaphysics you are here EN
-335 The "Art" of Rhetoric
The published title keeps the quotation marks around Art from Freese's 1926 Loeb edition. Its subject is public life — the assembly, the court, the funeral oration — but its form is the school's, like everything else of his that survives.
EN
-335 The Nicomachean Ethics (Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια)
The fullest of Aristotle's ethical treatises, and the one the tradition kept: it shares three books with the Eudemian Ethics, which covers the same ground. Its last page hands the subject over to the Politics.
EN
-330 Constitution of Athens (Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία)
Historians use it as a source rather than as a text to interpret, which is true of nothing else under Aristotle's name. It belongs beside the Politics, as the surviving piece of the survey that fed it.
EN
-330 Politics: A Treatise on Government (Πολιτικά)
Not a finished book but lectures, with shorter pieces and marginal notes worked in — and the place where the Nicomachean Ethics was heading when it closed by saying that the study of character runs on into the study of constitutions.
EN
-330 The Art of Poetry (Περὶ Ποιητικῆς)
The Rhetoric is its nearest neighbour in the corpus: nowhere else does Aristotle take an art apart from the maker's side, and nowhere else does he discuss poetry at any length.
EN
-320 Economics
Aristotle treats the same ground himself in the household economics of Politics I. These three books keep their place in his corpus on the strength of the name alone; scholarship removed them without settling on anyone else.
EN

— or open another of their works