Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

THE ULTIMATE EXPLANATIONS OF ALL THINGS 27the ultimate explanations of living things; geometry searches for the ultimateexplanations of extended things; etc. Metaphysics, on the other hand,searches for the first and ultimate explanations not of one kind of thing asopposed to another, but of all things.Third, the phrase ‘to know all things’ is crucially ambiguous; it canmean ‘to know everything about all things’ or it can mean ‘to knowsomething about all things’. When <strong>Aristotle</strong> asserts that metaphysics is thesearch for the first explanations of all things, he does not mean that suchexplanations will explain everything about all things; he means that theywill explain something about all things. In fact it will emerge that he thinksthat the first explanations of all things explain something very definiteabout all things: why each and every thing is a being, something that is, inthe first place. So metaphysics is ‘the universal science’ (hē katholou epistēmē,982 a 22), the science of all things; but it is the universal science because,above all, it investigates something very definite about all things: why eachand every thing is a being—something that is.Fourth, he says that the metaphysician will, ideally, have knowledge of allthings ‘to the extent that this is possible, and not by having knowledge ofeach one of them’ (982 a 9–10). There are two important points in thisclarification. First, the metaphysician will not know each and everyparticular thing that there is, for example each tree in each wood; rather,they will know all things in a general way. This is true of every science; forevery science knows things not as particulars, but in a general way.Forestry, for example, does not know each tree in each wood, but trees ingeneral, i.e. the general kind, trees. Second, the metaphysician will notknow things in a general way in the way in which the other sciences do;for such knowledge would simply amount to the sum of the specialsciences, each of which searches for knowledge of one kind of thing asopposed to another. Rather, the metaphysician will know all things in acompletely and radically general way, i.e. simply in so far as each thing is abeing, something that is, and not in so far as it is one as opposed toanother kind of thing.Fifth, metaphysics, the knowledge of the first explanations and firstprinciples of all things, is the knowledge that we acquire last, if we searchfor it and acquire it at all; and it is a kind of knowledge with which we areleast familiar. We may naturally call such knowledge, knowledge ofultimate explanations. The knowledge that we acquire first is senseperception (aisthēsis) and experience (empeiria), and this is the knowledgewith which we are most familiar; it is only later that we, or some of us atany rate, search for explanatory knowledge (epistēmē). But the kind ofexplanatory knowledge that is metaphysics we acquire only last, if we