Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

48 THE ULTIMATE EXPLANATIONS OF ALL THINGSsince it is the essence of a thing that determines to what general kind itbelongs. So in general <strong>Aristotle</strong> thinks that explanations, essences andkinds are independent of us, our thought and our language.iiiThe relation of metaphysics to the other sciences<strong>Aristotle</strong> conceives of metaphysics as a science: a search for explanatoryknowledge. To this extent metaphysics is like the special sciences, e.g.biology; for all the sciences search for explanatory knowledge about theirpeculiar area of interest. In general, the difference between metaphysicsand the other sciences is that each of the other sciences searches forexplanations of some things, but not all, and their area of interest is someone kind of thing as opposed to other kinds. Metaphysics, on the otherhand, searches for explanations of all things and of being as a whole.But how is metaphysics related to the other sciences? Is it simply thatwhereas the other sciences are specialized and search for explanations ofonly some things and some one kind of thing, metaphysics is the universalscience (he katholou epistēmē, 982 a 27), which searches for explanations ofall things and of being as a whole? If this is <strong>Aristotle</strong>’s view, thenmetaphysics will apparently run parallel to the other sciences, with nointeraction. In other words, metaphysics will ask more general questionsthan those asked by the special sciences, but otherwise its method will bethe method of the special sciences. We may recall that in general themethod of a special science is to start from what we already know throughsense perception and experience, and to search for explanations of what isknown through this prior knowledge. So (on the present interpretation)metaphysics will likewise start from sense perception and experience, andwill search for explanations of what is known in this way. The differencebetween metaphysics and the specialized sciences will be simply that thequestions that metaphysics asks of what is known through sense perceptionand experience will be more general than those asked by the special sciences.(For a defence of this line of interpretation, see Bolton 1996:231–280.)But this interpretation does not seem plausible. For we will see (inChapter 3) that, as <strong>Aristotle</strong> conceives it, metaphysics does not start fromsense perception and experience, at least not directly. It starts rather withcertain general and abstract aporiai (‘puzzles’, ‘problems’). Thus, at theopening of book III, the book of aporiai, he emphasizes that this is themethod that he wants to adopt in metaphysics: a method based in aporiai.But it is unnatural to think that the aporiai that he has in mind here havetheir source directly in sense perception and experience. For none of the