Aristotle’s Metaphysics
by Tatiana Velitchkov © 2009

The name Aristotle is often mentioned when talking about philosophy. He is one of the major figures in Greek and western philosophy who mesmerized the world with his great works between 384 BC and 322 BC. Some of Aristotle’s major areas of study were ethics, poetry, logic, theater, metaphysics, rhetoric and music plus others.

Metaphysics on the other hand is one of the first major branches of philosophy and is sometime also refereed to as natural philosophy. This word is derived from two Greek words Meta and physikas which means beyond and physical respectively.  It mainly focuses on explaining the natural and physical universe. Metaphysics also used to be one of way the ancients tried to address scientific questions before modern science was developed.

The traditional branches of metaphysics are cosmology and ontology.  The two are primarily concerned with describing the types of things on earth and the relationship between them in terms of space, time, origins, prospects and features. Some of Aristotle’s works of philosophy laid the foundation for metaphysics that examines nature’s existence without regards of special qualities that explains its being. His metaphysics seeks to give elaborate details on objects, math, matter, God and form. But most of his metaphysics works are influenced by the materials developed by his teacher Plato, namely theory of forms.

 
Some of the key issues addressed by Aristotle’s metaphysics include describing existence and kinds of things existing in the world. It also tries to explain why things exist as seen despite the changes they undergo and the various ways of understanding the world.  This is slightly different from Plato’s theory of form that described things as being eternal while the world as observed undergoes perpetual change.

In his work called Treatise, Aristotle goes to great length describing the principles of metaphysics as the first philosophy. Here Aristotle’s key emphasis focuses on describing study of a subject matter according to how it is being examined. This is also called study of being qua being or examining being under the aspect of being. He used this to study the principle and causes of beings in an abstract general way.

To help the study have an exhaustive critical look at all of beings in a logical way, Aristotle’s metaphysics divides them into ten distinctive categories.  He describes substance as beings that are unique, independent and that all other beings depend on it.  For instance, the quality of a being depends on the substance. This is also true for quantity of substance which relates to its dimension and total numbers in a group. Moreover non substances are described as beings that only exist in a subject therefore void cannot exist separately with out depending on a substance.

In this video is a brief introduction to Aristotle’s metaphysics