Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

1ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS1What is the Metaphysics about? The question, ‘What isbeing?’The work that we have here under the title ‘the Metaphysics’ (ta meta taphusika) is a series of fourteen books, all or most of which were written by<strong>Aristotle</strong> (384–322 BC). They belong to his latest period of work.Therefore the Metaphysics belongs to what <strong>Aristotle</strong> wrote after founding(in 335 BC) his own school of philosophy in Athens: the Lyceum orPeripatos. This means that, even if we take into account that theMetaphysics must have been written over an extended period of time,<strong>Aristotle</strong> must have produced the work some years after leaving theAcademy, Plato’s school in Athens; for he became a pupil of Plato (427–347 BC) at the age of seventeen, and he remained in Plato’s school, first asa pupil and later as a relatively independent researcher, for some twentyyears. But he left the Academy after Plato died.However, <strong>Aristotle</strong> did not write the Metaphysics as a single work, andeven the individual books (or sets of books) in it may not be finishedworks. Only after his death, and probably between 200 and 100 BC, werethese fourteen books arranged and published in the order in which we nowhave them. The title itself, ‘the Metaphysics’, is not <strong>Aristotle</strong>’s, but wasprobably devised by Andronicus of Rhodes when he put together theedition of the collected works of <strong>Aristotle</strong> (first century BC). He probablydevised this title (ta meta ta phusika, ‘the [books] that come after thePhysics’) to indicate that, in his view, the Metaphysics belongs naturallyafter another work by <strong>Aristotle</strong>, the Physics. We may suppose thatAndronicus thought that this is the natural place of the Metaphysics,because he thought that the study of all things and of things simply in sofar as they are beings, i.e. metaphysics as characterized by <strong>Aristotle</strong>, comes