- Length
- 464 pagesSachs, Aristotle's Metaphysics, Green Lion Press, 1999
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Metaphysics
The book that named a discipline by accident and then defined it for two thousand years. Aristotle never called this work metaphysics - the word comes from its place in an ancient arrangement, after the books on nature - and what he thought he was doing was first philosophy, the study of what it is for anything at all to be. Nearly every technical term still used in the field was coined or fixed here.
- Date
- c. 330 BC
- Author
- Aristotle
- Region
- Athens
- Language
- Ancient Greek
- 1801 English, Thomas Taylor First complete English version Consensus
- 1908 English, W. D. Ross The most reprinted English text Attested
- 1999 English, Joe Sachs Deliberately literal, avoiding the Latinate vocabulary; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Lectures
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 30 years
The vocabulary it invented - substance, essence, potentiality, actuality, accident - is still the working vocabulary of the subject, whatever position a philosopher takes on the doctrines.
What the book says
Fourteen books on the question of what it means for anything to be. Aristotle opens with a survey of everyone who has tried before him, which is also the first history of philosophy anyone wrote, and finds each predecessor grasping at one cause and missing the others. He then sets out the enquiry he wants: not a study of some particular kind of thing, as botany studies plants, but a study of things simply insofar as they are - being as being. The central books, generally taken as the heart of the work, ask what a substance is. Is it the matter something is made of, the form it takes, the compound of both, or the universal it falls under? Aristotle's answer is form, understood as the thing's essence, the what-it-is-to-be-that-thing. Along the way he distinguishes actuality from potentiality, which is the tool that lets him explain change without falling into Parmenides' trap: an acorn is not an oak, but it is potentially an oak, and becoming is the passage from one to the other. Book Gamma defends the principle of non-contradiction, arguing that anyone who denies it cannot say anything at all. Book Lambda ends with an unmoved mover: something that causes motion in everything else by being the object of their striving, itself unchanging, whose activity is thinking about thinking.
What it argues
That being is not one thing but is said in many ways, all of them related to a primary case: substance. A colour, a size and a position all exist, but they exist by belonging to something that exists in its own right. Understanding what a substance is therefore comes first, and Aristotle's answer is that it is the form or essence rather than the matter, since matter alone is indeterminate and could be anything. The distinction between potentiality and actuality then does the heavy work: it explains how a thing can change and remain itself, which is precisely what Parmenides had argued was impossible. The final book reaches a first cause of all motion, unmoving because it moves things as an object of desire does, not by pushing.
What it answered
Plato's Forms, and the whole strategy of explaining a thing by pointing to something separate from it. Aristotle spent twenty years in the Academy and knew the theory from inside; his critique is not a caricature. The argument later called the third man is his: if particular men are men by sharing in a Form, then the Form and the particulars have something in common, which needs a further Form to explain, and so on without end. His alternative is to put the form inside the thing, as its structure and its way of behaving, so that nothing has to be explained by reference to another world.
How it argues
By taking a word apart. Aristotle's characteristic move is to notice that a single term - being, one, cause, substance - covers several different things, to separate them, and to ask which is primary. Book Delta is a whole book of such distinctions and reads like a dictionary. The prose is compressed to the edge of unintelligibility in places and repeats itself in others, because it is lecture material worked over more than once and never published. This is not a book that was written; it is a book that was assembled.
The moment
Written for teaching in the Lyceum, to hearers who had already done the physics and the logic. Aristotle had by this point spent years dissecting animals and classifying them, and the habit shows: the enquiry proceeds by distinguishing senses of words, sorting cases, and asking what a thing does. The confidence that reality has joints and that careful language will find them is the working assumption of the entire treatise.
How it travelled
Through Arabic and back. Aristotle's school treatises did not circulate widely in antiquity and their survival ran through a tangled story of private libraries before an edition was put together in the first century BC. The Metaphysics reached Baghdad in translation, where al-Farabi and Ibn Sina rebuilt their systems on it and Ibn Rushd wrote a commentary on nearly every line. Latin Europe received it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, partly from Arabic and partly from the Greek, and it became the framework of university teaching so completely that the seventeenth century had to define itself against it.
The strongest objection
That the unmoved mover does not follow from anything that precedes it. Thirteen books of careful analysis of substance and change end with a single divine intellect eternally contemplating itself, and the join is not made. Readers from late antiquity onward have suspected that Book Lambda was a separate treatise attached to the rest, which would explain the seam but not repair the argument. The broader charge is that the whole enterprise reads structure into the world out of the structure of Greek grammar - that subjects and predicates became substances and accidents because that is how the language works - and Aristotle has no way of testing that from the inside.
Why read it
Not straight through, and not first. Book Gamma on non-contradiction and Book Zeta on substance are the two that reward a reader directly, and Book Alpha is worth reading as the first attempt anyone made to write the history of thought as a sequence of partial insights. What the whole gives, that nothing else does, is the experience of watching a vocabulary being built from nothing by someone who knows he is doing it.
- First printed
- 1495
- First in English
- 1801
- Digitised
- Yes
Jaeger's 1957 Oxford Classical Text is standard. The Bekker page and line numbers, from the Berlin edition of 1831, are the universal reference for all Aristotle.
Ross's translation is the most reprinted. Sachs, Reeve and the Clarendon Aristotle volumes are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live, though contested at every point. Contemporary metaphysics argues about substance, essence, potentiality and the modes of being in terms Aristotle set, and the revival of Aristotelian essentialism in the late twentieth century - through Kripke on necessity and through neo-Aristotelian metaphysics since - was a return to this book rather than a nod to it.
On quoting this book
Greek public domain; the usable English translations are in copyright. No passage is quoted.
Contested
The title is not Aristotle's and its origin is uncertain. The traditional story credits Andronicus of Rhodes with placing these books after the Physics in his first-century arrangement, and the name meaning simply after the physics; that account is itself late and is doubted by modern scholars, some of whom argue the label is older or that it was always meant to signal what comes after physics in the order of learning. The unity of the fourteen books is disputed, Alpha the Lesser is generally judged inauthentic, and Books Mu and Nu partly repeat Alpha. Whether the science of being as being and the theology of Book Lambda are one enquiry or two remains the central interpretive question.