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Metaphysics: What Is It? Why Is It Important Today?

This article defines the philosophical branch of metaphysics, outlining its key focuses and discussing why it’s important today.

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W hat is the fundamental nature of reality? What is time? What is space? Is there a God? Is the world around us ‘real’? What is change? Do numbers exist? What is causation, and can there be such a thing as a ‘first cause’? Why is reality like it is? What does it mean for something to exist? Why does anything exist?

These are just a few of the questions posed by the oft-derided, mind-melting realm of metaphysics, perhaps the most obscure of philosophy’s four core branches .

As 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant puts it:

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

What is metaphysics in simple words?

S o what is metaphysics, exactly? Like most metaphysical questions, that’s not an easy one to answer. We might think based on the word itself that it refers to some ‘meta’ version of physics, but that’s not quite accurate.

‘Metaphysics’ was actually coined by Andronicus of Rhodes, a bibliographer of Aristotle’s books in the first century BCE.

Andronicus was looking to categorize the works that came after Aristotle’s writings on ‘Physics’, and thus simply grouped them with the title ‘After Physics’ — or, ‘Metaphysics’.

Putting its rather arbitrary etymological origins to one side, we can say the word ‘metaphysics’ refers to the philosophical study of reality: metaphysics essentially attempts to establish a coherent picture of what reality ultimately is and how reality ultimately works .

In doing so, it explores basic issues around substance, existence, causality, determinism, modality, ontology, possibility, and nothingness — most of which are discussed by Aristotle in those initial writings grouped by Andronicus, but also by philosophers throughout history.

Giorgio de Chirico - The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, 1910, the first and defining work of the Pittura Metafisica (metaphysical painting) artistic movement.

To borrow American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars’s famous definition of philosophy, the aim of metaphysics is essentially...

to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.

What is the difference between metaphysics and physics?

O f course, there is overlap with the sciences here — notably physics — and we might think that actually physicists, backed by scientific data and experiment, are much better placed to ponder questions on the fundamental nature of reality than metaphysicians, who depend on armchair reasoning and deductive logic to construct their theories.

But, when it comes to reality, some philosophers argue there are questions that go beyond the scope of physics (after all, physics investigates what we are able to investigate, and philosophers have long suspected that what we are able to investigate may not be all there is).

Beyond or right on the edge of physics’ scope is thus where metaphysicians generally reside, restless in their creaking upholstery.

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A quick, dirty, and by no means foolproof way to distinguish metaphysics from the sciences is as follows: the sciences concern the specific ‘how’ of reality, metaphysics concerns the general ‘what’ and ‘why’.

For example, physicists may investigate the charge of a particle; a metaphysician asks what is charge, and what is a particle?

A physicist may investigate how particles causally interact; a metaphysician attempts to characterize causation itself.

A physicist may investigate the origins of the universe and theorize about its fundamental laws; a metaphysician asks why the universe exists — and why its laws obtain the way they do.

A physicist uses mathematics to express theory; a metaphysician asks what numbers are (i.e. whether numbers actually exist, or if they’re just useful fictions).

Indeed, ontology — the study of being or what it means for something to exist — has been a key battleground for metaphysicians throughout the ages.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Scientists or mathematicians may very well ask these questions too; but when they do so, it should be recognized that they are making metaphysical inquiries, and metaphysical positions should not be taken for granted.

For instance, the principle of physicalism — that everything that exists in the universe is either physical or reducible down to physical ‘stuff’ — might seem commonsensical; but it is actually a metaphysical position — one that philosophers have long disputed, from George Berkeley denying the existence of matter (and claiming everything is made of ‘mental stuff’ instead) to philosophers of consciousness today challenging physicalist conceptions of the mind.

The point here is not so much about whether physicalism is correct: it’s recognizing that there is a debate to be had in the first place, and in surfacing and examining any and all presuppositions upon which our theories about the world may rest.

Metaphysics is a rabbit hole about which many disagree. Beyond the general lines of inquiry referenced above, debates abound over what metaphysics even is or should be — especially in its relation to modern science.

What questions does metaphysics investigate?

W hile the lines between metaphysics and the sciences may seem a little blurred, as a quick summary we can say that, at root, many problems in science and philosophy — including whether we have free will , whether consciousness is physical , and what causation is — are metaphysical in nature.

Here are some further questions metaphysicians might investigate:

• What is the fundamental nature of reality?
• What is time? What is space?
• What is the relationship between mind and body?
• What does it mean for something to exist?
• What does it mean for something not to exist?
• What is the cosmos and everything in it made out of, and why?
• Why does the cosmos exist in the way that it does?
• Why does the cosmos exist at all?
• Is ours the only cosmos that could exist?
• Is everything in the cosmos contingent? Or is anything necessary?
• What is identity? What is change? How is change possible?
• Who or what is the self?
• What happens to the self after death?
• What does it mean for someone to act freely?
• Is true freedom possible?

Why is metaphysics important today?

E xploring such abstract, evidence-resistant metaphysical questions might seem pointless. Why argue about things we may never have an answer to? Why spill oceans of ink over things so far removed from everyday life? Why intrude on what is clearly now science’s territory and try to make grand arguments and construct complex theories about the fundamental nature of reality, its laws and emergent properties?

Well, defenders of metaphysics might state that it’s only by running up against the limitations of our language, by attempting to be clear-sighted at the hazy frontiers of our knowledge, that we can inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot, make progress.

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Metaphysics adds a level of conceptual rigor and clarity that can only improve the steadfastness of our knowledge: it is not here to compete with or replace any other fields, it is here as a necessary supplement to them in our quest for truth about reality.

Indeed, some argue that there is no real need to create a hard distinction between metaphysics and the sciences at all, for their aims are continuous and complementary.

And besides: dwelling on the actuality behind life is interesting, and good for the soul.

As Bertrand Russell puts it about philosophy generally, in a quotation that could readily be used to defend the study of metaphysics specifically:

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Learn more about metaphysics

I f you’re ready to explore the murky yet fascinating world of metaphysics further, we’ve assembled the best books about the subject, ranging from accessible and introductory surveys of the field, to stone-cold metaphysical classics from philosophers down the ages. Hit the banner below to access our metaphysics reading list now.

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Martin Heidegger, "What Is Metaphysics?"

This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 1999 online "CyberSeminar" entitled " The Continental Origins of Postmodernism ."

Essays and Comments on Heidegger's "What Is Metaphysics?"

1. Bryan Register, "Getting a Grip on Nothing"

2. Roger Donway, "Heidegger's Attempt to Redeem Metaphysics"

Summary of the Discussion

Do Heidegger's Arguments Matter? by David L. Potts

When I was a (much!) younger philosophy student, I used to argue vehemently with people who accepted the then very fashionable doctrine of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism seemed to me then, and still does, to be an absurdly, obviously (even contemptibly) false doctrine. One argument, which I thought quite devastating to cultural relativism (and, again, still do), is from self-referential inconsistency. That is, since cultural relativism holds that there is no objective truth, but only truth relative to a given culture, it is therefore impossible, within cultural relativism, to assert the (objective) truth of cultural relativism.

I found, however, that when I deployed self-referential inconsistency against cultural relativists, it never fazed them. Not that they denied the point, as you would expect of ordinary ideologues. They would usually in fact accept it when pushed far enough. They just didn’t care.

When I pointed out their inconsistency, cultural relativists just didn't care.

I was complaining about this sad state of affairs one day to a fellow student. And he said a thing, which I’ve never forgotten: “They don't care about arguments like that [self-referential inconsistency] because they evaluate a philosophy not by its arguments but by its prospects for yielding a satisfying solution to the whole range of philosophical problems.” For example, in the case of cultural relativism, cultural relativism abolishes the problems of trying to find objective criteria of knowledge, but at the same time doesn’t promote a free-for-all, since cultural strictures on knowledge claims still apply, and, best of all, seems to provide an iron-clad defense of social tolerance by undercutting people’s claims to final truth.

I want to suggest that Heidegger and his supporters likewise practice this “style” of philosophy. Observe the way Heidegger proceeds in “What Is Metaphysics?” He says science wants to study beings--and nothing else ( Basic Writings 97). In so doing he is claiming that the concept of everything somehow requires that of nothing. But he doesn’t press the point (which is good for him since it is false). He goes on to acknowledge that logic itself rules out the nothing, since thinking can only be of something (99). But then he asserts without argument that perhaps negation (the logical operation) depends upon some other, prior nothing (99). Then, after more burbling about the absurdity of trying to say something about nothing from the standpoint of logic, intellect, and science, he launches his analysis of anxiety (101) and just asserts that in anxiety we experience a nothing more primordial than mere logical negation, and he’s off to the races with oracular pronouncements about “Dasein,” nihilation, selfhood, freedom, Pure Being, and going “beyond metaphysics.”

In short, there is no serious argument in the essay whatever. It is a tissue of obscure assertions one is supposed to fit together into a satisfying total picture. Now, I am not exactly saying that if the arguments don’t matter to Heidegger they shouldn’t matter to us either; but I am saying that, if one tries to engage these people, one should not delude oneself that arguments are primary.

General Comment on Heidegger Discussion, by Stephen Hicks

Martin Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” is a difficult text for anyone. I was therefore impressed with the CyberSeminar’s participants’ level of analysis: those writing the lead essays focused on the essential issues, and those offering comments maintained that focus while developing and debating interpretations and implications. And I was slightly surprised and impressed with everyone’s ability to maintain civility while dealing with a frustrating text and with the unpleasantness of disagreeing with others. That’s not a small thing: my experience leads me to expect Objectivists to be focused and sharp in their analyses, but not to expect such consistent civility.

The twenty-six posts that I have read cover a comprehensive range of issues: defining Postmodernism, determining what Heidegger says, comparing Heidegger and Postmodernism, comparing Heidegger and Objectivism , and discussing what Objectivism itself says about several fundamental issues.

Submission in “What is Metaphysics?” by Michelle Fram Cohen

I would like to point out an interesting process which I observed in “What is Metaphysics.” This process involves three instances of the discussion of man’s relationship to whatever is outside of him, that is, everything else. The central issue is whether man is to submit to or to control everything else.

The first instance is the discussion of science in the beginning of the article (243). Heidegger describes man’s scientific activity as being of “a certain limited submission to what-is” and as having a “submissive attitude.” In this context, *submission* is a submission to the laws of the natural world, very much in the spirit of Francis Bacon’s statement: “Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Heidegger admits that based on this submission, science can acquire “a leadership of its own, albeit limited, in the whole field of human existence.”

It is a submission to a commandment for total self-annihilation.

The second instance is the discussion of modern science, as opposed to the science discussed before (258). In modern science, “what is” is determined by man’s will. Instead of submission to the subject matter which science refers to, the subject matter makes its appearance as a result of man’s will. Thus man gains “the sovereign power to effect a general objectivisation.” Once liberated from any need for submission to anything, all that man’s will needs is the will to will to secure its sovereignty.

The third and final instance is the discussion of man’s capacity for “essential thinking” as opposed to thinking on “what is” (262). Here man’s will apparently loses its sovereignty. Man is to surrender his “historical being” to the great “Being” in defiance of the welfare of “what is.” In a language reminiscent of Ellsworth Toohey’s advice to Catherine Halsey in The Fountainhead , only through a complete sacrifice of his self can man come to contact with the essential truth of Being.

The process brings man back to submission, but not the submission of obeying the laws of Nature. It is a submission to a commandment for total self-annihilation.

Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” by Stephen Hicks

My comments are supplementary to the pillar essays from Bryan Register and Roger Donway , and to the posts from David Potts , Jamie Mellway , Michael Young , and Eyal Mozes that offered commentary and further interpretation. I summarize briefly the main themes from Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” and list his similarities and differences with postmodernism.

As interpretive supplements I have included a few quotations from Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (transl. Ralph Manheim, Yale 1959, originally delivered as a lecture in 1935), and I mention his 1946 “Letter on Humanism,” written in response to Sartre’s humanistic version of existentialism. Other page numbers are to the version of “What Is Metaphysics?” that I am working from, the one in Walter Kaufmann’s revised and expanded edition of Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre .

Thematic Structure of “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger’s essay moves from:

(1) a characterization of metaphysics that is Aristotelian ontologically but Platonic/mystic epistemologically, to

(2) a consideration of the linguistic problems of discussing Being and Nothing, which leads to

(3) his rejecting or setting aside reason and logic as a means of doing metaphysics, to

4) the use of emotions such as boredom and dread to access Being and Nothing, to

5) a discussion of the human being/Da-sein that is involved in this metaphysical enterprise, to

6) an account of Being and Nothing that rejects the scientific account and reconciles itself with the Judeo-Christian/Hegelian account, and, finally,

(7) a discussion of Being/Nothing’s ethical demands upon us for sacrifice.

Heidegger scholarship contains controversy on all these points, exacerbated no doubt by the obscurity of the text. I don’t want to pronounce on the excellent interpretative debates that have emerged in the CyberSeminar discussions but rather to point out a few additional passages that bear on a final interpretation.

(1) Characterizing Metaphysics. Roger Donway and Eyal Mozes discussed extensively the extent to which Heidegger’s characterization of metaphysics is Aristotelian, Objectivist, or neither.

To that discussion let me add the following. (a) In doing metaphysics Heidegger says we are seeking the essence or ground of what-is. The essence/ground will be common to everything, and so true of all things; in that sense, Heidegger is Aristotelian. (b) However, the essence/ground is not for Heidegger given in ordinary experience: one must lose or distance oneself from ordinary experience to experience it. Since one can’t straightforwardly empirically or rationally come to experience or grasp abstractly the essence/ground, Heidegger is non-Aristotelian. (c) But it’s not quite Platonic either, for in coming to experience the essence/ground one is not leaving one metaphysical dimension and entering another; rather it seems to be a continuum of definiteness that one traverses in relating to what-is either more or less particularly or generally. (d) Finally, there is a mystic/agnostic streak in Heidegger, for in various places he indicates that the ultimate essence/ground is a mystery that will always be beyond the grasp of finite beings. In our text, an indication of this occurs about three pages before the end of the “Postscript,” when Heidegger says, in rejecting calculative thought’s relevance to metaphysics, that “Calculative thought places itself under compulsion to master everything in the logical terms of its procedure. It has no notion that in calculation everything calculable is already a whole whose unity naturally belongs to the incalculable which, with its mystery, ever eludes the clutches of calculation” (262). He seems to be saying not only that calculative thought cannot grasp the whole/unity, but that the unity of the whole is itself ultimately a mystery.

Let me consider together (2) Linguistic problems of Being and Nothing, (3) Rejecting/setting aside logic and reason, and (6) Heidegger’s account of Being and Nothing. Given the impossibility of capturing the Nothing in terms acceptable to logic, Bryan Register raises the question of the extent to which Heidegger is rejecting logic or merely traditional and inadequate logics.

Early in “The Development of the Question” section, Heidegger indicates that his target is not simply traditional logic, but rather reason as a whole, of which logic is a part. He notes that his project fails if one assumes “that in this enquiry ‘logic’ is the highest court of appeal, that reason is the means and thinking the way to an original comprehension of Nothing and its possible revelation” (245)/ So we have “logic,” reason, and thinking as the obstacles to his project. Later, in the section entitled “The Answer to the Question,” Heidegger, having indicated his account of Nothing, says: “If this breaks the sovereignty of reason in the field of enquiry into Nothing and Being, then the fate of the rule of ‘logic’ is also decided. The very idea of ‘logic’ disintegrates in the vortex of a more original questioning” (253). “Logic” is rejected since reason itself is rejected. This suggests a more radical rejection of logic.

Just how radical a rejection is indicated about halfway through the “Postscript,” where Heidegger tells us why he puts “logic” in scare quotes: “In order to indicate that ‘logic’ is only one exposition of the nature of thinking, and one which, as its name shows, is based on the experience of Being as attained in Greek thought” (261). Thus, it is the entire tradition of philosophy as initiated by the Greeks that Heidegger is targeting and calling into question.

(Let me add two quotations about logic from Introduction to Metaphysics that speak to this issue: “Authentic speaking about nothing always remains extraordinary. It cannot be vulgarized. It dissolves if it is placed in the cheap acid of merely logical intelligence” (26) and “Logic is an invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers” (121).)

The reason for this radical rejection of logic and reason is that Heidegger’s account of Being and Nothing comes out of the Judeo-Christian and Hegelian traditions. Our first whiff of serious Hegelianism, in “The Answer to the Question” section, occurs when Heidegger identifies Nothing with the essence of Being: “Nothing not merely provides the conceptual opposite of what-is but is also an original part of essence. It is in the Being of what-is that the nihilation of Nothing occurs” (251). Then, having developed this theme, Heidegger quotes approvingly Hegel’s identification of Being and Nothing. “‘Pure Being and pure Nothing are thus one and the same.’ This proposition of Hegel’s (‘The Science of Logic,’ I, WW III, p. 74) is correct” (255). All of this discussion takes place in the context of affirming the Judeo-Christian account of creation, in which God created the world out of nothing (254-255); as Heidegger puts it, “every being, so far as it is a being, is made out of nothing.”

Heidegger thus frames the debate the way Objectivists would: the choice is between a rational/logical/Aristotelian metaphysic and a non-rational/non-logical/Christian/Hegelian one.

Hicks on Heidegger, Part Deux, by Stephen Hicks

(The following remarks, like those in my earlier post, are brief and intended as complementary to those interpretations of Heidegger in the pillar essays and commentaries.)

(5) Heidegger on Da-sein. Having rejected reason and logic, Heidegger feels furcht. Or rather, since the state of furcht is fear directed toward particulars and the state he describes is one of dread/anxiety about everything in general and nothing in particular, he experiences angst.

This angst is the metaphysically revelatory state for Heidegger. It is to the extent that one is in this state of dread/anxiety that Da-sein reaches its metaphysical ground. Here, Heidegger seems to emphasize two features of pure Da-sein : its indefiniteness (in contrast to its definiteness when focused on day-to-day ordinary things) and its activity (in contrast to its being a subject or a thing).

Angst is the metaphysically revelatory state for Heidegger.

Heidegger explains his choice of “Da-sein” by defining it as follows: “ Da-sein means being projected into Nothing” (251). It is the being projecting that is Da-sein--not that, if anything, which is projected or does the projecting. This emphasis on activity fits with Heidegger’s desire to avoid subject/object characterizations. It also fits with Heidegger’s being a type of Existentialist, for he emphasizes that what we are is defined by activity, rather than by being a substance with a set nature, and that the core activity is projection into Nothing, rather than into a world of solid identity that is what it is. (Here a comparison to Sartre may be helpful: for Sartre, our existence precedes essence, and we define ourselves by the core commitments we make.)

The theme of indefiniteness appears on page 249. There Heidegger seems to indicate that one loses identity to the extent that one projects into Nothing. (This contrasts with some other Existentialists who hold that we acquire identity to the extent we make commitments.) “In dread we are ‘in suspense’ (wir schweben). Or, to put it more precisely, dread holds us in suspense because it makes what-is-in-totality slip away from us. Hence we too, as existents in the midst of what-is, slip away from ourselves along with it. For this reason it is not ‘you’ or ‘I’ that has the uncanny feeling, but ‘one.’ In the trepidation of this suspense where there is nothing to hold on to, pure Da-sein is all that remains.” The “one” that remains for Heidegger is not a particularized “you” or “I,” but a state of being overwhelmed by Nothing: “The only thing that remains and overwhelms us whilst what-is slips away, is this ‘nothing’” (249).

(When I read this, I thought of Rand’s description of John Galt as a man that reality fit like a glove. For Heidegger, by contrast, all of reality slips away from one, one loses one’s “I” identity, and to that extent one is Da-sein.)

This is for Heidegger more than a metaphysical or phenomenological characterization: it has ethical import. In the main body of the essay, Heidegger occasionally uses evaluative terms such as “courageous” (253) to describe those who seek/accept the dread/anxiety and speaks of the “crucial importance” of “letting oneself go into Nothing” (257). In the “Postscript” he speaks more explicitly of the ethics.

(7) Being/Nothing’s ethical demands upon us for sacrifice. In their posts, Bryan Register and Roger Donway present a more humanistic version of Heideggerian ethics, emphasizing the themes of freedom, choice, self-creation, and self-determination. These themes dominate Sartrean versions of Existentialism, and there is much debate about the extent to which they are Heideggerian or not.

Man and everything that “is” are to be sacrificed to that which is higher: the truth of Being.

As supplement, I will mention Heidegger’s 1946 essay, “Letter on Humanism,” written in response to his former student Sartre’s 1945 lecture on humanism. In Sartre’s lecture, man was still the center of all meaning and valuation--“man is the future of man,” according to Sartre. This drew Heidegger’s wrath. For Heidegger, putting man at the center has been the great crime of western philosophy since Plato, for on Heidegger’s account all the evils of the modern world--science, technology, capitalism, communism--stem from “anthropologizing” Being. For Heidegger, that whole man-centered tradition needed “Destruktion.” Being is not for man; rather man is for Being.

This I think fits with the role Heidegger gives to sacrifice in the last few pages of the “Postscript” to “What Is Metaphysics?” Two particularly striking quotations follow.

“The need is: to preserve the truth of Being no matter what may happen to man and everything that ‘is.’ Freed from all constraint, because born of the abyss of freedom, this sacrifice is the expense of our human being for the preservation of the truth of Being in respect of what-is” (262).

And: “Sacrifice is rooted in the nature of the event through which Being claims man for the truth of Being. Therefore it is that sacrifice brooks no calculation, for calculation always miscalculates sacrifice in terms of the expedient and the inexpedient, no matter whether the aims are set high or low. Such calculation distorts the nature of sacrifice. The search for a purpose dulls the clarity of the awe, the spirit of sacrifice ready prepared for dread, which takes upon itself kinship with the imperishable” (263).

Man and everything that “is,” i.e., the day-to-day, non-metaphysical realm, are to be sacrificed to that which is higher: the truth of Being. We are not to ask why sacrifice is needed, for that would be to seek calculable purposes. We do know from earlier in the essay, however, that the truth of Being is that Being is Nothing. So if we are still allowed to be logical at this point, we seem to have in Heidegger a call for unquestioning sacrifice of everything human for Nothing. As Michelle Fram-Cohen suggested, this is a call for self-annihilation.

Heidegger and Postmodernism. Heidegger’s similarities to postmodernism are many, and I found Roger Donway’s list to be very helpful. I would like to highlight three similarities.

(a) Heidegger’s use of linguistic sleight of hand for its own sake and for discrediting reason is a precursor to the techniques of deconstruction.

(b) Heidegger’s identification of his enemy as the whole western philosophical tradition is a precursor to the postmodernists’ attempting to set aside all previous philosophies, whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, Lockean, or Kantian.

(c) Heidegger’s making emotions, and especially negative emotions, be especially revelatory and central is a precursor to many postmodernists’ dark psychological worlds and their focus on the disturbed, marginalized, and bizarre.

I don’t think of Heidegger as a postmodernist but rather as a last step to postmodernism. Two differences strike me as significant.

(d) Heidegger is doing metaphysics, and speaks of there being a truth out there about the world that we must seek or let find us, while postmodernists are anti-realists, holding that it is meaningless to speak of truths out there or of a language that could capture them.

(e) Heidegger speaks of the mysteriousness of deep truth about Being, while for most postmodernists everything is either surface and superficial or able to be exposed by deconstruction.

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Aristotle’s Metaphysics

The first major work in the history of philosophy to bear the title “Metaphysics” was the treatise by Aristotle that we have come to know by that name. But Aristotle himself did not use that title or even describe his field of study as ‘metaphysics’; the name was evidently coined by the first century C.E. editor who assembled the treatise we know as Aristotle’s Metaphysics out of various smaller selections of Aristotle’s works. The title ‘metaphysics’—literally, ‘after the Physics ’—very likely indicated the place the topics discussed therein were intended to occupy in the philosophical curriculum. They were to be studied after the treatises dealing with nature ( ta phusika ). In this entry, we discuss the ideas that are developed in Aristotle’s treatise.

References in the text to the books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics are given by Greek letter. In order (with the corresponding Roman numeral given in parentheses) these are: Α (I), α (II), Β (III), Γ (IV), Δ (V), Ε (VI), Ζ (VII), Η (VIII), Θ (IX), I (X), Κ (XI), Λ (XII), Μ (XIII), Ν (XIV). Translations are taken from Reeve (2016).

1. The Subject Matter of Aristotle’s Metaphysics

2. the categories, 3. the role of substance in the study of being qua being, 4. the fundamental principles: axioms, 5. what is substance, 6. substance, matter, and subject, 7. substance and essence, 8. substances as hylomorphic compounds, 9. substance and definition, 10. substances and universals, 11. substance as cause of being, 12. actuality and potentiality, 13. unity reconsidered, 14. theology, 15. glossary of aristotelian terminology, other internet resources, related entries.

Aristotle himself described his subject matter in a variety of ways: as ‘first philosophy’, or ‘the study of being qua being’, or ‘wisdom’, or ‘theology’. A comment on these descriptions will help to clarify Aristotle’s topic.

In Metaphysics Α.1, Aristotle says that “everyone takes what is called ‘wisdom’ ( sophia ) to be concerned with the primary causes ( aitia ) and the starting-points (or principles, archai )” (981 b 28), and it is these causes and principles that he proposes to study in this work. It is his customary practice to begin an inquiry by reviewing the opinions previously held by others, and that is what he does here, as Book Α continues with a history of the thought of his predecessors about causes and principles.

These causes and principles are clearly the subject matter of what he calls ‘first philosophy’. But this does not mean the branch of philosophy that should be studied first. Rather, it concerns issues that are in some sense the most fundamental or at the highest level of generality. Aristotle distinguished between things that are “better known to us” and things that are “better known in themselves,” [ 1 ] and maintained that we should begin our study of a given topic with things better known to us and arrive ultimately at an understanding of things better known in themselves. The principles studied by ‘first philosophy’ may seem very general and abstract, but they are, according to Aristotle, better known in themselves, however remote they may seem from the world of ordinary experience. Still, since they are to be studied only by one who has already studied nature (which is the subject matter of the Physics ), they are quite appropriately described as coming “after the Physics .”

Aristotle’s description ‘the study of being qua being’ is frequently and easily misunderstood, for it seems to suggest that there is a single (albeit special) subject matter—being qua being—that is under investigation. But Aristotle’s description does not involve two things—(1) a study and (2) a subject matter (being qua being)—for he did not think that there is any such subject matter as ‘being qua being’. Rather, his description involves three things: (1) a study, (2) a subject matter (being), and (3) a manner in which the subject matter is studied (qua being).

Aristotle’s Greek word that has been Latinized as ‘qua’ means roughly ‘in so far as’ or ‘under the aspect’. A study of x qua y , then, is a study of x that concerns itself solely with the y aspect of x . So Aristotle’s study does not concern some recondite subject matter known as ‘being qua being’. Rather it is a study of being, or better, of beings—of things that can be said to be—that studies them in a particular way: as beings, in so far as they are beings.

Of course, first philosophy is not the only field of inquiry to study beings. Natural science and mathematics also study beings, but in different ways, under different aspects. The natural scientist studies them as things that are subject to the laws of nature, as things that move and undergo change. That is, the natural scientist studies things qua movable (i.e., in so far as they are subject to change). The mathematician studies things qua countable and measurable. The metaphysician, on the other hand, studies them in a more general and abstract way—qua beings. So first philosophy studies the causes and principles of beings qua beings. In Γ.2, Aristotle adds that for this reason it studies the causes and principles of substances ( ousiai ). We will explain this connection in Section 3 below.

In Book Ε, Aristotle adds another description to the study of the causes and principles of beings qua beings. Whereas natural science studies objects that are material and subject to change, and mathematics studies objects that although not subject to change are nevertheless not separate from (i.e., independent of) matter, there is still room for a science that studies things (if indeed there are any) that are eternal, not subject to change, and independent of matter. Such a science, he says, is theology, and this is the “first” and “highest” science. Aristotle’s identification of theology, so conceived, with the study of being qua being has proved challenging to his interpreters. We discuss this identification in Section 14 below.

Finally, we may note that in Book Β, Aristotle delineates his subject matter in a different way, by listing the problems or perplexities ( aporiai ) he hopes to deal with. Characteristic of these perplexities, he says, is that they tie our thinking up in knots. They include the following, among others: Are sensible substances the only ones that exist, or are there others besides them? Is it kinds or individuals that are the elements and principles of things? And if it is kinds, which ones: the most generic or the most specific? Is there a cause apart from matter? Is there anything apart from material compounds? Are the principles limited, either in number or in kind? Are the principles of perishable things themselves perishable? Are the principles universal or particular, and do they exist potentially or actually? Are mathematical objects (numbers, lines, figures, points) substances? If they are, are they separate from or do they always belong to sensible things? And (“the hardest and most perplexing of all,” Aristotle says) are unity and being the substance of things, or are they attributes of some other subject? In the remainder of Book Β, Aristotle presents arguments on both sides of each of these issues, and in subsequent books he takes up many of them again. But it is not always clear precisely how he resolves them, and it is possible that Aristotle did not think that the Metaphysics contains definitive solutions to all of these perplexities.

To understand the problems and project of Aristotle’s Metaphysics , it is best to begin with one of his earlier works, the Categories . Although placed by long tradition among his logical works (see the discussion in the entry on Aristotle’s logic ), due to its analysis of the terms that make up the propositions out of which deductive inferences are constructed, the Categories begins with a strikingly general and exhaustive account of the things there are ( ta onta )—beings. According to this account, beings can be divided into ten distinct categories. (Although Aristotle never says so, it is tempting to suppose that these categories are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of the things there are.) They include substance, quality, quantity, and relation, among others. Of these categories of beings, it is the first, substance ( ousia ), to which Aristotle gives a privileged position.

Substances are unique in being independent things; the items in the other categories all depend somehow on substances. That is, qualities are the qualities of substances; quantities are the amounts and sizes that substances come in; relations are the way substances stand to one another. These various non-substances all owe their existence to substances—each of them, as Aristotle puts it, exists only ‘in’ a subject. That is, each non-substance “is in something, not as a part, and cannot exist separately from what it is in” ( Cat . 1 a 25). Indeed, it becomes clear that substances are the subjects that these ontologically dependent non-substances are ‘in’.

Each member of a non-substance category thus stands in this inherence relation (as it is frequently called) to some substance or other—color is always found in bodies, knowledge in the soul. Neither whiteness nor a piece of grammatical knowledge, for example, is capable of existing on its own. Each requires for its existence that there be some substance in which it inheres.

In addition to this fundamental inherence relation across categories, Aristotle also points out another fundamental relation that obtains between items within a single category. He describes this as the relation of “being said of a subject,” and his examples make clear that it is the relation of a more general to a less general thing within a single category. Thus, man is ‘said of’ a particular man, and animal is ‘said of’ man, and therefore, as Aristotle points out, animal is ‘said of’ the particular man also. The ‘said of’ relation, that is to say, is transitive (cf. 1 b 10). So the genus (e.g., animal) is ‘said of’ the species (e.g., man) and both genus and species are ‘said of’ the particular. The same holds in non-substance categories. In the category of quality, for example, the genus (color) is ‘said of’ the species (white) and both genus and species are ‘said of’ the particular white. There has been considerable scholarly dispute about these particulars in nonsubstance categories. For more detail, see the supplementary document:

Nonsubstantial Particulars

The language of this contrast (‘in’ a subject vs. ‘said of’ a subject) is peculiar to the Categories , but the idea seems to recur in other works as the distinction between accidental vs. essential predication. Similarly, in works other than the Categories , Aristotle uses the label ‘universals’ ( ta katholou ) for the things that are “said of many;” things that are not universal he calls ‘particulars’ ( ta kath’ hekasta ). Although he does not use these labels in the Categories , it is not misleading to say that the doctrine of the Categories is that each category contains a hierarchy of universals and particulars, with each universal being ‘said of’ the lower-level universals and particulars that fall beneath it. Each category thus has the structure of an upside-down tree. [ 2 ] At the top (or trunk) of the tree are the most generic items in that category [ 3 ] (e.g., in the case of the category of substance, the genus plant and the genus animal); branching below them are universals at the next highest level, and branching below these are found lower levels of universals, and so on, down to the lowest level universals (e.g., such infimae species as man and horse); at the lowest level—the leaves of the tree—are found the individual substances, e.g., this man, that horse, etc.

The individuals in the category of substance play a special role in this scheme. Aristotle calls them “primary substances” ( prôtai ousiai ) for without them, as he says, nothing else would exist. Indeed, Aristotle offers an argument (2 a 35–2 b 7) to establish the primary substances as the fundamental entities in this ontology. Everything that is not a primary substance, he points out, stands in one of the two relations (inhering ‘in’, or being ‘said of’) to primary substances. A genus, such as animal, is ‘said of’ the species below it and, since they are ‘said of’ primary substances, so is the genus (recall the transitivity of the ‘said of’ relation). Thus, everything in the category of substance that is not itself a primary substance is, ultimately, ‘said of’ primary substances. And if there were no primary substances, there would be no “secondary” substances (species and genera), either. For these secondary substances are just the ways in which the primary substances are fundamentally classified within the category of substance. As for the members of non-substance categories, they too depend for their existence on primary substances. A universal in a non-substance category, e.g., color, in the category of quality, is ‘in’ body, Aristotle tells us, and therefore in individual bodies. For color could not be ‘in’ body, in general, unless it were ‘in’ at least some particular bodies. Similarly, particulars in non-substance categories (although there is not general agreement among scholars about what such particulars might be) cannot exist on their own. E.g., a determinate shade of color, or a particular and non-shareable bit of that shade, is not capable of existing on its own—if it were not ‘in’ at least some primary substance, it would not exist. So primary substances are the basic entities—the basic “things that there are”—in the world of the Categories .

The Categories leads us to expect that the study of being in general (being qua being) will crucially involve the study of substance, and when we turn to the Metaphysics we are not disappointed. First, in Metaphysics Γ Aristotle argues in a new way for the ontological priority of substance; and then, in Books Ζ, Η, and Θ, he wrestles with the problem of what it is to be a substance. We will begin with Γ’s account of the central place of substance in the study of being qua being.

As we noted above, metaphysics (or, first philosophy) is the science which studies being qua being. In this respect it is unlike the specialized or departmental sciences, which study only part of being (only some of the things that exist) or study beings only in a specialized way (e.g., only in so far as they are changeable, rather than in so far as they are beings).

But ‘being’, as Aristotle tells us in Γ.2, is “said in many ways”. That is, the verb ‘to be’ ( einai ) has different senses, as do its cognates ‘being’ ( on ) and ‘entities’ ( onta ). So the universal science of being qua being appears to founder on an equivocation: how can there be a single science of being when the very term ‘being’ is ambiguous?

Consider an analogy. There are dining tables, and there are tide tables. A dining table is a table in the sense of a smooth flat slab fixed on legs; a tide table is a table in the sense of a systematic arrangement of data in rows and columns. But there is not a single sense of ‘table’ which applies to both the piece of furniture at which I am writing these words and to the small booklet that lies upon it. Hence it would be foolish to expect that there is a single science of tables, in general, that would include among its objects both dining tables and tide tables. Tables, that is to say, do not constitute a single kind with a single definition, so no single science, or field of knowledge, can encompass precisely those things that are correctly called ‘tables’.

If the term ‘being’ were ambiguous in the way that ‘table’ is, Aristotle’s science of being qua being would be as impossible as a science of tables qua tables. But, Aristotle argues in Γ.2, ‘being’ is not ambiguous in this way. ‘Being’, he tells us, is ‘said in many ways’ but it is not merely (what he calls) ‘homonymous’, i.e., sheerly ambiguous. Rather, the various senses of ‘being’ have what he calls a ‘ pros hen ’ ambiguity—they are all related to a single central sense. (The Greek phrase ‘ pros hen ’ means “in relation to one.”)

Aristotle explains his point by means of some examples that he takes to be analogous to ‘being’. Consider the terms ‘healthy’ and ‘medical’. Neither of these has a single definition that applies uniformly to all cases: not every healthy (or medical) thing is healthy (medical) in the same sense of ‘healthy’ (‘medical’). There is a range of things that can be called ‘healthy’: people, diets, exercise, complexions, etc. Not all of these are healthy in the same sense. Exercise is healthy in the sense of being productive of health; a clear complexion is healthy in the sense of being symptomatic of health; a person is healthy in the sense of having good health.

But notice that these various senses have something in common: a reference to one central thing, health, which is actually possessed by only some of the things that are spoken of as ‘healthy’, namely, healthy organisms, and these are said to be healthy in the primary sense of the term. Other things are considered healthy only in so far as they are appropriately related to things that are healthy in this primary sense.

The situation is the same, Aristotle claims, with the term ‘being’. It, too, has a primary sense as well as related senses in which it applies to other things because they are appropriately related to things that are called ‘beings’ in the primary sense. The beings in the primary sense are substances; the beings in other senses are the qualities, quantities, etc., that belong to substances. An animal, e.g., a horse, is a being, and so is a color, e.g, white, a being. But a horse is a being in the primary sense—it is a substance—whereas the color white (a quality) is a being only because it qualifies some substance. An account of the being of anything that is, therefore, will ultimately have to make some reference to substance. Hence, the science of being qua being will involve an account of the central case of beings—substances.

Before embarking on this study of substance, however, Aristotle goes on in Book Γ to argue that first philosophy, the most general of the sciences, must also address the most fundamental principles—the common axioms—that are used in all reasoning. Thus, first philosophy must also concern itself with the principle of non-contradiction (PNC): the principle that “the same thing cannot at the same time belong and also not belong to the same thing and in the same respect” (1005 b 19). This, Aristotle says, is the most certain of all principles, and it is not just a hypothesis. It cannot, however, be proved, since it is employed, implicitly, in all proofs, no matter what the subject matter. It is a first principle, and hence is not derived from anything more basic.

What, then, can the science of first philosophy say about the PNC? It cannot offer a proof of the PNC, since the PNC is presupposed by any proof one might offer—any purported proof of the PNC would therefore be circular. Aristotle thus does not attempt to prove the PNC; in the subsequent chapters of Γ he argues, instead, that it is impossible to disbelieve the PNC. Those who would claim to deny the PNC cannot, if they have any beliefs at all, believe that it is false. For one who has a belief must, if he is to express this belief to himself or to others, say something—he must make an assertion. He must, as Aristotle says, signify something. But the very act of signifying something is possible only if the PNC is accepted. Without accepting the PNC, one would have no reason to think that his words have any signification at all—they could not mean one thing rather than another. So anyone who makes any assertion has already committed himself to the PNC. Aristotle thus does not argue that the PNC is a necessary truth (that is, he does not try to prove the PNC); rather, he argues that the PNC is indubitable. (For more on the PNC, see the discussion in the entry on Aristotle’s logic )

In the seventeen chapters that make up Book Ζ of the Metaphysics , Aristotle takes up the promised study of substance. He begins by reiterating and refining some of what he said in Γ: that ‘being’ is said in many ways, and that the primary sense of ‘being’ is the sense in which substances are beings. Here, however, he explicitly links the secondary senses of ‘being’ to the non-substance categories. The primacy of substance leads Aristotle to say that the age-old question ‘What is being?’ “is just the question ‘What is substance?’” (1028 b 4).

One might have thought that this question had already been answered in the Categories . There we were given, as examples of primary substances, an individual man or horse, and we learned that a primary substance is “what is neither in a subject nor said of a subject” (2 a 10). This would seem to provide us with both examples of, and criteria for being, primary substances. But in Metaphysics Ζ, Aristotle does not seem to take either the examples or the criteria for granted.

In Ζ.2 he recounts the various answers that have been given to the question of which things are substances—bodies (including plants, animals, the parts of plants and animals, the elements, the heavenly bodies), things more basic than bodies (surfaces, lines, and points), imperceptible things (such as Platonic Forms and mathematical objects)—and seems to regard them all as viable candidates at this point. He does not seem to doubt that the clearest examples of substances are perceptible ones, but leaves open the question whether there are others as well.

Before answering this question about examples, however, he says that we must first answer the question about criteria: what is it to be a substance ( tên ousian prôton ti estin )? The negative criterion (“neither in a subject nor said of a subject”) of the Categories tells us only which things are substances. But even if we know that something is a substance, we must still say what makes it a substance—what the cause is of its being a substance. This is the question to which Aristotle next turns. To answer it is to identify, as Aristotle puts it, the substance of that thing.

Ζ.3 begins with a list of four possible candidates for being the substance of something: essence, universal, genus, and subject. Presumably, this means that if x is a substance, then the substance of x might be either (i) the essence of x , or (ii) some universal predicated of x , or (iii) a genus that x belongs to, or (iv) a subject of which x is predicated. The first three candidates are taken up in later chapters, and Ζ.3 is devoted to an examination of the fourth candidate: the idea that the substance of something is a subject of which it is predicated.

A subject, Aristotle tells us, is “that of which the other things are said, but which is itself not further said of any other thing” (1028 b 36). This characterization of a subject is reminiscent of the language of the Categories , which tells us that a primary substance is not predicated of anything else, whereas other things are predicated of it. Candidate (iv) thus seems to reiterate the Categories criterion for being a substance. But there are two reasons to be wary of drawing this conclusion. First, whereas the subject criterion of the Categories told us that substances were the ultimate subjects of predication, the subject criterion envisaged here is supposed to tell us what the substance of something is. So what it would tell us is that if x is a substance, then the substance of x —that which makes x a substance—is a subject that x is predicated of. Second, as his next comment makes clear, Aristotle has in mind something other than this Categories idea. For the subject that he here envisages, he says, is either matter or form or the compound of matter and form. These are concepts from Aristotle’s Physics , and none of them figured in the ontology of the Categories . To appreciate the issues Aristotle is raising here, we must briefly compare his treatment of the notion of a subject in the Physics with that in the Categories .

In the Categories , Aristotle was concerned with subjects of predication: what are the things we talk about, and ascribe properties to? In the Physics , his concern is with subjects of change: what is it that bears (at different times) contrary predicates and persists through a process of change? But there is an obvious connection between these conceptions of a subject, since a subject of change must have one predicate belonging to it at one time that does not belong to it at another time. Subjects of change, that is, are also subjects of predication. (The converse is not true: numbers are subjects of predication—six is even, seven is prime—but not of change.)

In the Categories , individual substances (a man, a horse) were treated as fundamental subjects of predication. They were also understood, indirectly, as subjects of change. (“A substance, one and the same in number, can receive contraries. An individual man, for example, being one and the same, becomes now pale and now dark, now hot and now cold, now bad and now good” 4 a 17–20.) These are changes in which substances move, or alter, or grow. What the Categories did not explore, however, are changes in which substances are generated or destroyed. But the theory of change Aristotle develops in the Physics requires some other subject for changes such as these—a subject of which substance is predicated—and it identifies matter as the fundamental subject of change (192 a 31–32). Change is seen in the Physics as a process in which matter either takes on or loses form.

The concepts of matter and form, as we noted, are absent from the Categories . Individual substances—this man or that horse—apart from their accidental characteristics—the qualities, etc., that inhere in them—are viewed in that work as essentially simple, unanalyzable atoms. Although there is metaphysical structure to the fact that, e.g., this horse is white (a certain quality inheres in a certain substance), the fact that this is a horse is a kind of brute fact, devoid of metaphysical structure. This horse is a primary substance, and horse , the species to which it belongs, is a secondary substance. But there is no predicative complex corresponding to the fact that this is a horse in the way that there is such a complex corresponding to the fact that this horse is white.

But from the point of view of the Physics , substantial individuals are seen as predicative complexes (cf. Matthen 1987b); they are hylomorphic compounds—compounds of matter and form—and the subject criterion looks rather different from the hylomorphic perspective. Metaphysics Ζ.3 examines the subject criterion from this perspective.

Matter, form, and the compound of matter and form may all be considered subjects, Aristotle tells us, (1029 a 2–4), but which of them is substance? The subject criterion by itself leads to the answer that the substance of x is an entirely indeterminate matter of which x is composed (1029 a 10). For form is predicated of matter as subject, and one can always analyze a hylomorphic compound into its predicates and the subject of which they are predicated. And when all predicates have been removed (in thought), the subject that remains is nothing at all in its own right—an entity all of whose properties are accidental to it (1029 a 12–27). The resulting subject is matter from which all form has been expunged. (Traditional scholarship calls this “prime matter,” but Aristotle does not here indicate whether he thinks there actually is such a thing.) So the subject criterion leads to the answer that the substance of x is the formless matter of which it is ultimately composed.

But Aristotle rejects this answer as impossible (1029 a 28), claiming that substance must be “separable” ( chôriston ) and “this something” ( tode ti , sometimes translated “some this”), and implying that matter fails to meet this requirement. Precisely what the requirement amounts to is a matter of considerable scholarly debate, however. A plausible interpretation runs as follows. Separability has to do with being able to exist independently ( x is separable from y if x is capable of existing independently of y ), and being a this something means being a determinate individual. So a substance must be a determinate individual that is capable of existing on its own. (One might even hold, although this is controversial, that on Aristotle’s account not every “this something” is also “separable.” A particular color or shape might be considered a determinate individual that is not capable of existing on its own—it is always the color of shape of some substance or other.) But matter fails to be simultaneously both chôriston and tode ti . The matter of which a substance is composed may exist independently of that substance (think of the wood of which a desk is composed, which existed before the desk was made and may survive the disassembly of the desk), but it is not as such any definite individual—it is just a quantity of a certain kind of matter. Of course, the matter may be construed as constituting a definite individual substance (the wood just is , one might say, the particular desk it composes), but it is in that sense not separable from the form or shape that makes it that substance (the wood cannot be that particular desk unless it is a desk). So although matter is in a sense separable and in a sense a this something, it cannot be both separable and a this something. It thus does not qualify as the substance of the thing whose matter it is.

Aristotle turns in Ζ.4 to a consideration of the next candidate for substance: essence. (‘Essence’ is the standard English translation of Aristotle’s curious phrase to ti ên einai , literally “the what it was to be” for a thing. This phrase so boggled his Roman translators that they coined the word essentia to render the entire phrase, and it is from this Latin word that ours derives. Aristotle also sometimes uses the shorter phrase to ti esti , literally “the what it is,” for approximately the same idea.) In his logical works , Aristotle links the notion of essence to that of definition ( horismos )—“a definition is an account ( logos ) that signifies an essence” ( Topics 102 a 3)—and he links both of these notions to a certain kind of per se predication ( kath’ hauto , literally, “in respect of itself,” or “intrinsically“)—”what belongs to a thing in respect of itself belongs to it in its essence ( en tôi ti esti )” for we refer to it “in the account that states the essence” ( Posterior Analytics , 73 a 34–5). He reiterates these ideas in Ζ.4: “there will be an essence only of those things whose logos is a definition” (1030 a 6), “the essence of each thing is what it is said to be intrinsically” (1029 b 14). It is important to remember that for Aristotle, one defines things, not words. The definition of tiger does not tell us the meaning of the word ‘tiger’; it tells us what it is to be a tiger, what a tiger is said to be intrinsically. Thus, the definition of tiger states the essence—the “what it is to be” of a tiger, what is predicated of the tiger per se .

Aristotle’s preliminary answer (Ζ.4) to the question “What is substance?” is that substance is essence, but there are important qualifications. For, as he points out, “definition ( horismos ), like ‘what-it-is’ ( ti esti ), is said in many ways too” (1030 a 19). That is, items in all the categories are definable, so items in all the categories have essences—just as there is an essence of man, there is also an essence of white and an essence of musical. But, because of the pros hen equivocity of ‘is’, such essences are secondary—“in the primary ( protôs ) and unconditional way ( haplôs ) definition and the essence belong to substances” (1030 b 4–6). Thus, Ζ.4 tells us, it is only these primary essences that are substances. Aristotle does not here work out the details of this “hierarchy of essences” (Loux, 1991), but it is possible to reconstruct a theory of such a hierarchy on the basis of subsequent developments in Book Ζ.

In Ζ.6, Aristotle goes on to argue that if something is “primary” and “spoken of in respect of itself ( kath’ hauto legomenon )” it is one and the same as its essence. The precise meaning of this claim, as well as the nature and validity of the arguments offered in support of it, are matters of scholarly controversy. But it does seem safe to say that Aristotle thinks that an “accidental unity” such as a pale man is not a kath’ hauto legomenon (since pallor is an accidental characteristic of a man) and so is not the same as its essence. Pale man , that is to say, does not specify the “what it is” of any primary being, and so cannot be an essence of the primary kind. As Ζ.4 has already told us, essence, in the primary sense, “will belong to things that are species of a genus and to nothing else” (1030 a 11–12). Man is a species, and so there is an essence of man; but pale man is not a species and so, even if there is such a thing as the essence of pale man, it is not, at any rate, a primary essence.

At this point there appears to be a close connection between the essence of a substance and its species ( eidos ), and this might tempt one to suppose that Aristotle is identifying the substance of a thing (since the substance of a thing is its essence) with its species. (A consequence of this idea would be that Aristotle is radically altering his conception of the importance of the species, which in the Categories he called a secondary substance, that is, a substance only in a secondary sense.) But such an identification would be a mistake, for two reasons. First, Aristotle’s point at 1030 a 11 is not that a species is an essence, but that an essence of the primary kind corresponds to a species (e.g., man ) and not to some more narrowly delineated kind (e.g., pale man ). Second, the word ‘ eidos ’, which meant ‘species’ in the logical works, has acquired a new meaning in a hylomorphic context, where it means ‘form’ (contrasted with ‘matter’) rather than ‘species’ (contrasted with ‘genus’). In the conceptual framework of Metaphysics Ζ, a universal such as man or horse —which was called a species and a secondary substance in the Categories —is construed as “not substance but rather a compound of a sort, [consisting] of this account and this matter taken universally” (Ζ.10, 1035 b 29–30). The eidos that is primary substance in Book Ζ is not the species that an individual substance belongs to but the form that is predicated of the matter of which it is composed. [ 4 ]

The role of form in this hylomorphic context is the topic of Ζ.7–9. (Although these chapters were almost certainly not originally included in Book Ζ—there is no reference to them, for example, in the summary of Ζ given in Η.1, which skips directly from Ζ.6 to Ζ.10—they provide a link between substance and form and thus fill what would otherwise be a gap in the argument.) Since individual substances are seen as hylomorphic compounds, the role of matter and form in their generation must be accounted for. Whether we are thinking of natural objects, such as plants and animals, or artifacts, such as houses, the requirements for generation are the same. We do not produce the matter (to suppose that we do leads to an infinite regress) nor do we produce the form (what could we make it out of?); rather, we put the form into the matter, and produce the compound (Ζ.8, 1033 a 30–b9). Both the matter and the form must pre-exist (Ζ.9, 1034 b 12). But the source of motion in both cases—what Aristotle calls the “moving cause” of the coming to be—is the form.

In production that results from craft (or art, technê ), “the form is in the soul ” (1032 b 23) of the craftsman. For example, “the craft [of building] is the form [of the house]” (1034 a 24) and the craft, i.e., the form, is in the understanding, and hence in the soul, of the builder. The builder has in mind the plan or design for a house and he knows how to build; he then “enmatters” that plan or design by putting it into the materials out of which he builds the house. In natural production, the form is found in the parent, where “the begetter is of this same sort as the begotten (not that they are the same thing, certainly, nor one in number, but one in form)—for example, in the case of natural things. For human begets human” (1033 b 29–31). But in either case, the form pre-exists and is not produced (1033 b 18).

As for what is produced in such hylomorphic productions, it is correctly described by the name of its form, not by that of its matter. What is produced is a house or a man, not bricks or flesh. Of course, what is made of gold may still be described in terms of its material components, but we should call it not “gold” but “golden” (1033 a 7). For if gold is the matter out of which a statue is made, there was gold present at the start, and so it was not gold that came into being. It was a statue that came into being, and although the statue is golden—i.e., made of gold—it cannot be identified with the gold of which it was made.

The essence of such a hylomorphic compound is evidently its form, not its matter. As Aristotle says “by form I mean the essence of each thing and the primary substance” (1032 b 1), and “by the substance without matter I mean the essence” (1032 b 14). It is the form of a substance that makes it the kind of thing that it is, and hence it is form that satisfies the condition initially required for being the substance of something. The substance of a thing is its form.

In Ζ.10 and 11, Aristotle returns to the consideration of essence and definition left off in Ζ.6, but now within the hylomorphic context developed in Ζ.7–9. The main question these chapters consider is whether the definition of x ever includes a reference to the matter of x . If some definitions include a reference to matter, then the link between essence and form would seem to be weakened.

Aristotle begins Ζ.10 by endorsing the following principle about definitions and their parts: “a definition is an account, and every account has parts, and as the account is to the thing, so the part of the account is to the part of the thing” (1034 b 20–22). That is, if y is a part of a definable thing x , then the definition of x will include as a part something z that corresponds to y . Indeed, z must stand to y in the same relation that the definition of x stands in to x ; that is, z is the definition of y . So, according to this principle, the definition of a thing will include the definitions of its parts.

In a way, this consequence of the principle seems very plausible, given Aristotle’s idea that it is universals that are definable (Ζ.11, 1036 a 29). Consider as a definiendum a universal, such as man , and its definiens, rational animal . The parts of this definiens are the universals rational and animal . If these parts are, in turn, definable, then each should be replaced, in the definition of man , with its own definition, and so on. In this way the complete and adequate definition of a universal such as man will contain no parts that are further definable. All proper, or completely analyzed, definitions are ultimately composed of simple terms that are not further definable.

But the implication of this idea for the definitions of hylomorphic compounds is obvious: since matter appears to be a part of such a compound, the definition of the compound will include, as a part, the definitions of its material components. And this consequence seems implausible to Aristotle. A circle, for example, seems to be composed of two semicircles (for it obviously may be divided into two semicircles), but the definition of circle cannot be composed of the definitions of its two semicircular parts. For, as Aristotle points out (1035 b 9), semicircle is defined in terms of circle , and not the other way around. His point is well taken, for if circles were defined in terms of semicircles, then presumably semicircles would be defined in terms of the quarter-circles of which they are composed, and so on, ad infinitum . The resulting infinite regress would make it impossible to define circle at all, for one would never reach the ultimate “simple” parts of which such a definition would be composed.

Aristotle flirts with the idea of distinguishing between different senses in which one thing can be a part of another (1034 b 33), but instead proposes a different solution: to specify carefully the whole of which the matter is allegedly a part. “And of the compound statue the bronze is a part, but of what is said to be a statue as form it is not a part” (1035 a 6). Similarly, “even if the line, when divided, passes away into the halves, or the human into the bones, sinews, and flesh, it is not the case that because of this they are composed of these as being parts of the substance” (1035 a 17–20). Rather, “what is divided into these as into matter is not the substance but the compound” (1035 b 20–1).

In restating his point “yet more perspicuously” (1035 b 4), Aristotle notes parenthetically another important aspect of his theory of substance. He reiterates the priority of form, and its parts, to the matter into which a compound is divided, and notes that “the soul of animals (for this is substance of the animate) is the substance that is in accord with the account and is the form and the essence” (1035 b 14–5). The idea recurs in Ζ.11, where he announces that “it is clear too that the soul is primary substance, whereas the body is matter” (1037 a 5). It is further developed, in the Metaphysics , in Ζ.17, as we will see below, and especially in De Anima . For more detail on this topic, see Section 3 of the entry on Aristotle’s psychology .

Returning now to the problem raised by the apparent need to refer to matter in the definition of a substance, we may note that the solution Aristotle offered in Ζ.10 is only partially successful. His point seems to be that whereas bronze may be a part of a particular statue, neither that particular batch of bronze nor even bronze in general enters into the essence of statue, since being made of bronze is no part of what it is to be a statue. But that is only because statues, although they must be made of some kind of matter, do not require any particular kind of matter. But what about kinds of substances that do require particular kinds of matter? Aristotle’s distinction between form and compound cannot be used in such cases to isolate essence from matter. Thus there may after all be reasons for thinking that reference to matter will have to intrude into at least some definitions.

In Ζ.11, Aristotle addresses just such a case (although the passage is difficult and there is disagreement over its interpretation). “The form of the human is always found in flesh and bones and parts of this sort,” Aristotle writes (1036 b 4). The point is not just that each particular man must be made of matter, but that each one must be made of matter of a particular kind—flesh and bones, etc. “Some things,” he continues, “presumably are this in this” (1036 b 23), i.e., a particular form in a particular kind of matter, so that it is not possible to define them without reference to their material parts (1036 b 28). Nevertheless, Aristotle ends Ζ.11 as if he has defended the claim that definition is of the form alone. Perhaps his point is that whenever it is essential to a substance that it be made of a certain kind of matter (e.g., that man be made of flesh and bones, and that one “could not make a saw of wool or wood,” Η.4, 1044 a 28) this is in some sense a formal or structural requirement. A kind of matter, after all, can itself be analyzed hylomorphically—bronze, for example, is a mixture of copper and tin according to a certain ratio or formula ( logos ), which is in turn predicated of some more generic underlying subject. The reference to matter in a definition will thus always be to a certain kind of matter, and hence to a predicate, rather than a subject. At any rate, if by ‘matter’ one has in mind the ultimate subject alluded to in Ζ.3 (so-called ‘prime matter’), there will be no reference to it in any definition, “for it is indefinite” (1037 a 27).

Ζ.12 introduces a new problem about definitions—the so-called “unity of definition.” The problem is this: definitions are complex (a definiens is always some combination of terms), so what accounts for the definiendum being one thing, rather than many (1037 b 10)? Suppose that man is defined as two-footed animal ; “why, then, is this one and not many—animal and two-footed?” (1037 b 13–14). Presumably, Aristotle has in mind his discussion in Ζ.4 of such “accidental unities” as a pale man. The difference cannot be that our language contains a single word (‘man’) for a two-footed animal, but no single word for a pale man, for Aristotle has already conceded (1029 b 28) that we might very well have had a single term (he suggests himation , literally ‘cloak’) for a pale man, but that would still not make the formula ‘pale man’ a definition nor pale man an essence (1030 a 2).

Aristotle proposes a solution that applies to definitions reached by the “method of division.” According to this method (see Aristotle’s logic ), one begins with the broadest genus containing the species to be defined, and divides the genus into two sub-genera by means of some differentia. One then locates the definiendum in one of the sub-genera, and proceeds to divide this by another differentia, and so on, until one arrives at the definiendum species. This is a classic definition by genus and differentia. Aristotle’s proposal is that “the division should take the differentia of the differentia” (1038 a 9). For example, if one uses the differentia footed to divide the genus animal , one then uses a differentia such as cloven-footed for the next division. If one divides in this way, Aristotle claims, “it is evident that the ultimate (or completing, teleutaia ) differentia will be the substance of the thing and its definition” (1038 a 19). For each “differentia of a differentia” entails its predecessor (being cloven-footed entails being footed), and so the long chain of differentiae can be replaced simply by the ultimate differentia, since it entails all of its predecessors. As Aristotle points out, it would be redundant to include any of the differentiae in the chain other than the ultimate one: “when we say footed two-footed animal … we shall be saying the same thing several times over” (1038 a 22–24).

This proposal shows how a long string of differentiae in a definition can be reduced to one, but it does not solve the problem of the unity of definition. For we are still faced with the apparent fact that genus + differentia constitutes a plurality even if the differentia is the ultimate, or “completing,” one. It is not surprising, then, that Aristotle returns to the problem of unity later (Η.6) and offers a different solution.

At this point, we seem to have a clear idea about the nature of substantial form as Aristotle conceives of it. A substantial form is the essence of a substance, and it corresponds to a species. Since it is an essence, a substantial form is what is denoted by the definiens of a definition. Since only universals are definable, substantial forms are universals. That substantial forms are universals is confirmed by Aristotle’s comment, at the end of Ζ.8, that “Socrates and Callias … are distinct because of their matter … but the same in form” (1034 a 6–8). For them to be the same in form is for them to have the same form, i.e., for one and the same substantial form to be predicated of two different clumps of matter. And being “predicated of many” is what makes something a universal ( De Interpretatione 17 a 37).

But Ζ.13 throws our entire understanding into disarray. Aristotle begins by returning to the candidates for the title of ousia introduced in Ζ.3, and points out that having now discussed the claims of the subject and the essence, it is time to consider the third candidate, the universal. But the remainder of the chapter consists of a barrage of arguments to the conclusion that universals are not substances.

Ζ.13 therefore produces a fundamental tension in Aristotle’s metaphysics that has fragmented his interpreters. Some maintain that Aristotle’s theory is ultimately inconsistent, on the grounds that it is committed to all three of the following propositions:

(i) Substance is form. (ii) Form is universal. (iii) No universal is a substance.

Others have provided interpretations according to which Aristotle does not maintain all of (i)–(iii), and there is a considerable variety of such interpretations, too many to be canvassed here. But there are two main, and opposed, lines of interpretation. According to one, Aristotle’s substantial forms are not universals after all, but each belongs exclusively to the particular whose form it is, and there are therefore as many substantial forms of a given kind as there are particulars of that kind. According to the other, Aristotle’s arguments in Ζ.13 are not intended to show that no universal is a substance, tout court , but some weaker thesis that is compatible with there being only one substantial form for all of the particulars belonging to the same species. Proponents of particular forms (or essences) include Sellars 1957, Harter 1975, Hartman 1977, Irwin 1988, and Witt 1989b. Opponents include Woods 1967, Owen 1978, Code 1986, Loux 1991, and Lewis 1991.

It would be foolish to attempt to resolve this issue within the confines of the present entry, as it is perhaps the largest, and most disputed, single interpretative issue concerning Aristotle’s Metaphysics . we will, instead, mention some of the main considerations brought up on each side of this dispute, and give our reasons for thinking that substantial forms are universals.

The idea that substantial forms are particulars is supported by Aristotle’s claims that a substance is “separable and this something ” ( chôriston kai tode ti , Ζ.3), that there are no universals apart from their particulars (Ζ.13), and that universals are not substances (Ζ.13). On the other side, the idea that substantial forms are universals is supported by Aristotle’s claims that substances are, par excellence , the definable entities (Ζ.4), that definition is of the universal (Ζ.11), and that it is impossible to define particulars (Ζ.15).

In our opinion, the indefinability of particulars makes it impossible for substantial forms to be particulars. If there were a substantial form that is unique to some sensible particular, say Callias, then the definition corresponding to that form, or essence, would apply uniquely to Callias—it would define him, which is precisely what Aristotle says cannot be done. The question, then, is whether the evidence against substantial forms being universals can be countered. This is less clear, but the following considerations are relevant. (1) Aristotle’s claim that a substantial form is an individual ( tode ti ) does not exclude its being a universal ( katholou ). Universals are contrasted with particulars ( kath’ hekasta ), not individuals (although Aristotle does sometimes ignore the distinction between tode ti and kath’ hekaston ). What makes something a tode ti is its being a fully determinate thing, not further differentiable; what makes something a kath’ hekaston is its being a particular thing, unrepeatable, and not predicated of anything else. There is thus the possibility of a universal tode ti —a fully determinate universal not further divisible into lower-level universals, but predicated of numerous particulars. (2) The claim that there are no universals apart from particulars needs to be understood in context. When Aristotle asserts (1038 b 33) that “there is not some animal … beyond the particular ones ( ta tina )” he is just as likely to be referring to the particular kinds of animals as he is to particular specimens. If so, his point may be that a generic kind, such as animal, is ontologically dependent on its species, and hence on the substantial forms that are the essences of those species. (3) The arguments of Ζ.13 against the substantiality of universals are presented as part of a give-and-take investigation of the perplexities involved in the notion of substantial form. It is not clear, therefore, whether the blanket claim “No universal is a substance” is intended to be accepted without qualification. Indeed, a closer examination of the arguments may show that qualifications are required if the arguments are to be cogent. For example, the argument at 1038 b 11–15 is based on the premise that the substance of x is peculiar ( idion ) to x . It then draws the conclusion that a universal cannot be the substance of all of its instances (for it could not be idion to all of them), and concludes that it must be the substance “of none.” But note that this conclusion does not say that no universal can be a substance, but only that no universal can be the substance of any of its instances (cf. Code 1978). Aristotle’s point may be that since form is predicated of matter, a substantial form is predicated of various clumps of matter. But it is not the substance of those clumps of matter, for it is predicated accidentally of them. The thing with which it is uniquely correlated, and of which it is the substance, is not one of its instances, but is the substantial form itself . This conclusion should not be surprising in light of Aristotle’s claim in Ζ.6 that “each substance is one and the same as its essence.” A universal substantial form just is that essence.

In Ζ.17 Aristotle proposes a new point of departure in his effort to say what sort of a thing substance is. The new idea is that a substance is a “starting-point and cause” ( archê kai aitia , 1041 a 9) of being. Before looking at the details of his account, we will need to make a brief detour into Aristotle’s theory of causes. The relevant texts are Physics II.3, Posterior Analytics II.11, and Metaphysics Α.3 and Δ.2. See also the entry on Aristotle’s natural philosophy and Section 2 of the entry on Aristotle’s psychology .

The word aitia (“cause” or, perhaps better, “explanation”), Aristotle tells us, is “said in many ways.” In one sense, a cause is “that out of which a thing comes to be, and which persists; e.g., bronze, silver, and the genus of these are causes of a statue or a bowl” ( Physics 194 b 24). A cause in this sense has been traditionally called a material cause, although Aristotle himself did not use this label. In a second sense, a cause is “the form … the account of the essence” (194 b 27), traditionally called the formal cause. A third sense, traditionally called the efficient cause, is “the primary source of change or rest” (194 b 30). In this sense, Aristotle says, an adviser is the cause of an action, a father is the cause of his child, and in general the producer is the cause of the product. Fourth is what is traditionally called the final cause, which Aristotle characterizes as “the end ( telos ), that for which a thing is done” (194 b 33). In this sense, he says, health is the cause of walking, since we might explain a person’s walking by saying that he walks in order to be healthy—health is what the walking is for . Note that, as in this case, “things may be causes of one another—hard work of fitness, and fitness of hard work—although not in the same sense: fitness is what hard work is for, whereas hard work is principle of motion” (195 a 10). So hard work is the efficient cause of fitness, since one becomes fit by means of hard work, while fitness is the final cause of hard work, since one works hard in order to become fit.

Although Aristotle is careful to distinguish four different kinds of cause (or four different senses of ‘cause’), it is important to note that he claims that one and the same thing can be a cause in more than one sense. As he puts it, “form, mover, and telos often coincide” (198 a 25). And in De Anima he is perfectly explicit that the soul, which is the form or essence of a living thing, “is a cause in three of the ways we have distinguished” (415 b 10)—efficient, formal, and final.

Let us return to Aristotle’s discussion in Ζ.17. The job of a cause or principle of being, he notes, is to explain why one thing belongs to another (1041 a 11); that is, it is to explain some predicational fact. What needs to be explained, for example, is why this is a man , or that is a house . But what kind of a question is this? The only thing that can be a man is a man; the only thing that can be a house is a house. So we would appear to be asking why a man is a man, or why a house is a house, and these seem to be foolish questions that all have the same answer: because each thing is itself (1041 a 17–20). The questions must therefore be rephrased by taking advantage of the possibility of a hylomorphic analysis. We must ask, e.g., “why are these—for example, brick and stones—a house?” (1041 a 26). The answer Aristotle proposes is that the cause of being of a substance (e.g., of a house) is the form or essence that is predicated of the matter (e.g., of the bricks and stones) that constitute that substance. The essence is not always just a formal cause; in some cases, Aristotle says, it is also a final cause (he gives the examples of a house and a bed), and in some cases an efficient cause (1041 a 29–30). But in any case “what is being looked for is the cause in virtue of which the matter is something—and this is the substance” (1041 b 6–9) and “the primary cause of its being” (1041 b 27).

Notice that the explanandum in these cases (“why is this a man?” or “why is that a house?”) involves a species predication (“Callias is a man,” “Fallingwater is a house”). But the answer Aristotle proposes invokes a hylomorphic analysis of these questions, in which form is predicated of matter. So Callias is a man because the form or essence of man is present in the flesh and bones that constitute the body of Callias; Fallingwater is a house because the form of house is present in the materials of which Fallingwater is made. In general, a species predication is explained in terms of an underlying form predication, whose subject is not the particular compound but its matter. Form predications are thus more basic than their corresponding species predications. A substantial form, as a primary definable, is its own substance, for it is essentially predicated of itself alone. But the substantial form of a material compound, because it is predicated (accidentally) of the matter of the compound, is the cause of the compound’s being the kind of thing that it is. The form is therefore, in a derivative way, the substance of the compound, as well.

In Metaphysics Ζ, Aristotle introduces the distinction between matter and form synchronically, applying it to an individual substance at a particular time. The matter of a substance is the stuff it is composed of; the form is the way that stuff is put together so that the whole it constitutes can perform its characteristic functions. But soon he begins to apply the distinction diachronically, across time. This connects the matter/form distinction to another key Aristotelian distinction, that between potentiality ( dunamis ) and actuality ( entelecheia ) or activity ( energeia ). This distinction is the main topic of Book Θ.

Aristotle distinguishes between two different senses of the term dunamis . In the strictest sense, a dunamis is the power that a thing has to produce a change. A thing has a dunamis in this sense when it has within it “a starting-point of change in another thing or in itself insofar as it is other” (Θ.1, 1046 a 12; cf. Δ.12). The exercise of such a power is a kinêsis —a movement or process. So, for example, the housebuilder’s craft is a power whose exercise is the process of housebuilding. But there is a second sense of dunamis —and it is the one in which Aristotle is mainly interested—that might be better translated as ‘potentiality’. For, as Aristotle tells us, in this sense dunamis is related not to movement ( kinêsis ) but to activity ( energeia )(Θ.6, 1048 a 25). A dunamis in this sense is not a thing’s power to produce a change but rather its capacity to be in a different and more completed state. Aristotle thinks that potentiality so understood is indefinable (1048 a 37), claiming that the general idea can be grasped from a consideration of cases. Activity is to potentiality, Aristotle tells us, as “what is awake is in relation to what is asleep, and what is seeing is in relation to what has its eyes closed but has sight, and what has been shaped out of the matter is in relation to the matter” (1048 b 1–3).

This last illustration is particularly illuminating. Consider, for example, a piece of wood, which can be carved or shaped into a table or into a bowl. In Aristotle’s terminology, the wood has (at least) two different potentialities, since it is potentially a table and also potentially a bowl. The matter (in this case, wood) is linked with potentialty; the substance (in this case, the table or the bowl) is linked with actuality. The as yet uncarved wood is only potentially a table, and so it might seem that once it is carved the wood is actually a table. Perhaps this is what Aristotle means, but it is possible that he does not wish to consider the wood to be a table. His idea might be that not only can a piece of raw wood in the carpenter’s workshop be considered a potential table (since it can be transformed into one), but the wood composing the completed table is also, in a sense, a potential table. The idea here is that it is not the wood qua wood that is actually a table, but the wood qua table. Considered as matter, it remains only potentially the thing that it is the matter of. (A contemporary philosopher might make this point by refusing to identify the wood with the table, saying instead that the wood only constitutes the table and is not identical to the table it constitutes.)

Since Aristotle gives form priority over matter, we would expect him similarly to give actuality priority over potentiality. And that is exactly what we find (Θ.8, 1049 b 4–5). Aristotle distinguishes between priority in logos (account or definition), in time, and in substance. (1) Actuality is prior in logos since we must cite the actuality when we give an account of its corresponding potentiality. Thus, ‘visible’ means ‘capable of being seen ’; ‘buildable’ means ‘capable of being built ’(1049 b 14–16). (2) As regards temporal priority, by contrast, potentiality may well seem to be prior to actuality, since the wood precedes the table that is built from it, and the acorn precedes the oak that it grows into. Nevertheless, Aristotle finds that even temporally there is a sense in which actuality is prior to potentiality: “the active that is the same in form, though not in number [with a potentially existing thing], is prior [to it]” (1049 b 18–19). A particular acorn is, of course, temporally prior to the particular oak tree that it grows into, but it is preceded in time by the actual oak tree that produced it, with which it is identical in species. The seed (potential substance) must have been preceded by an adult (actual substance). So in this sense actuality is prior even in time.

(3) Aristotle argues for the priority in substance of actuality over potentiality in two ways. (a) The first argument makes use of his notion of final causality. Things that come to be move toward an end ( telos )—the boy becomes a man, the acorn becomes an oak—and “the activity is the end, and it is for the sake of this that the capacity [or potentiality] is acquired. For animals do not see in order that they may have sight, rather they have sight in order that they may see … matter is potentially something because it may come in the form of it—at any rate, when it is actively something, then it is in the form of it” (1050 a 9–17). Form or actuality is the end toward which natural processes are directed. Actuality is therefore a cause in more than one sense of a thing’s realizing its potential. As we noted in Section 11, one and the same thing may be the final, formal, and efficient cause of another. Suppose an acorn realizes its potential to become an oak tree. The efficient cause here is the actual oak tree that produced the acorn; the formal cause is the logos defining that actuality; the final cause is the telos toward which the acorn develops—an actual (mature) oak tree.

(b) Aristotle also offers (1050 b 6–1051 a 2) an “even stricter” argument for his claim that actuality is prior in substance to potentiality. A potentiality is for either of a pair of opposites; so anything that is capable of being is also capable of not being. What is capable of not being might possibly not be, and what might possibly not be is perishable. Hence anything with the mere potentiality to be is perishable. What is eternal is imperishable, and so nothing that is eternal can exist only potentially—what is eternal must be fully actual. But the eternal is prior in substance to the perishable. For the eternal can exist without the perishable, but not conversely, and that is what priority in substance amounts to (cf. Δ.11, 1019 a 2). So what is actual is prior in substance to what is potential.

In Η.6, Aristotle returns to the problem of the unity of definition ( discussed above in Section 9 ) and offers a new solution based on the concepts of potentiality and actuality. He begins by pointing out (recalling the language of Ζ.17) that the things whose unity he is trying to explain are those “that have several parts and where the totality of them is not like a heap, but the whole is something beyond the parts” (1045 a 8–10). His task is to explain the unity of such complexes.

The problem is insoluble, he says, unless one realizes that “there is on the one hand matter and on the other shape (or form, morphê ), and the one is potentially and the other actively.” Once one realizes this, “then what we are inquiring into will no longer seem to be a puzzle” (1045 a 20–25). He offers the following example (1045 a 26–35). Suppose round bronze were the definition of ‘cloak’. If someone were to ask “what makes a cloak one thing, a unity?” the answer would be obvious. For bronze is the matter, and roundness is the form. The bronze is potentially round, and round is what the bronze actually is when it has received this form. The cause of the unity of the cloak (in this sense of ‘cloak’) is just the cause of bronze being made round. Since the cloak is something that was produced, or brought into being, there is no cause of its unity other than the agent who put the form into the matter. Bronze (the matter) is a potential sphere, and the cloak is an actual sphere. But round bronze is equally the essence of both the actual sphere and the potential one. The bronze and the roundness are not two separate things. The bronze is potentially a sphere, and when it is made round it constitutes an actual one—a single sphere of bronze.

It is easy to see how this hylomorphic analysis explains the unity of a substantial material particular, since neither the matter nor the form of such a particular is by itself a single material individual, and it is only when they are taken together that they constitute such an individual. But the question Aristotle is trying to answer is this: “why on earth is something one when the account of it is what we call a defnition?” (Ζ.12, 1037 b 11). Since proper definables are universals, it remains to be seen how the proposed solution applies to them. After all, universals are not material objects, and so it is not clear how they can be viewed as hylomorphic compounds. But Aristotle has at his disposal a concept that can fill this bill perfectly, viz., the concept of intelligible matter ( hulê noêtê ). (The main purpose of intelligible matter is to provide something quasi-material for pure geometrical objects that are not realized in bronze or stone, for example, to be made of.) So we surmise that it is for this reason that Aristotle goes on (1045 a 33) to introduce matter into the current context. If this is so, we may conclude that the material component in the definition of a species is intelligible matter. Elsewhere, he explicitly describes genus as matter: “the genus is the matter of what it is said to be the genus of” (Ι.8, 1058a23). So a species too, although it is not itself a material object, can be considered a hylomorphic compound. Its matter is its genus, which is only potentially the species defined; its differentia is the form that actualizes the matter. The genus does not actually exist independently of its species any more than bronze exists apart from all form. The genus animal , for example, is just that which is potentially some specific kind of animal or other. Aristotle concludes (1045 b 17–21) that “the ultimate matter and the form ( morphê ) are one and the same, the one potentially, the other actively … and what potentially is and what actively is are in a way one.”

This solution, of course, applies only to hylomorphic compounds. But that is all it needs to do, according to Aristotle. For he ends the chapter by claiming that the problem of unity does not arise for other kinds of compounds that are not material: “Things that have no matter … are all unconditionally just what is a one” (1045 b 23).

The science of being qua being is a science of form. But it is also theology, the science of god. The question now is, how can it be both? And to it Aristotle gives a succinct answer:

If there is some immovable substance, this [that is, theological philosophy] will be prior and will be primary philosophy, and it will be universal in this way, namely, because it is primary. And it will belong to it to get a theoretical grasp on being qua being, both what it is and the things that belong to it insofar as it is being. (E.1, 1026 a 29–32)

So the primacy of theology, which is based on the fact that it deals with substance that is eternal, immovable, and separable, is supposedly what justifies us in treating it as the universal science of being qua being.

A reminder, first, of what this primacy is. As we saw in Sections 2–3 above, only beings in the category of substance are separable, so that they alone enjoy a sort of ontological priority that is both existential and explanatory. Thus walking and being healthy are characterized as “incapable of being separated,” on the grounds that there is some particular substantial underlying subject of which they are predicated (Z.1, 1028 a 20–31). Often, indeed, separability is associated with being such a subject: “The underlying subject is prior, which is why the substance is prior” (Δ.11, 1019 a 5–6); “If we do not posit substances to be separated, and in the way in which particular things are said to be separated, we will do away with the sort of substance we wish to maintain” (M.10, 1086 b 16–19). Similarly, not being separable is associated with being predicated of such a subject: “All other things are either said of primary substances as subjects or in them as subjects. Therefore, if there were no primary substances, there could not be anything else” ( Cat . 2 b 3–6). The starting-points and causes of all beings, then, must be substances. But for all that has been shown so far, the universe could still be made up of lots of separate substances having little ontologically to do with each other.

Here it may serve to return to Z.3, which opens by calling attention to something said ( legomenon ) about substance, namely that:

Something is said to be ( legetai ) substance, if not in more ways, at any rate most of all in four. For the essence, the universal, and the genus seem to be the substance of each thing, and fourth of these, the underlying subject. (1028 b 33–36)

Since “the primary underlying subject seems most of all to be substance” (1029 a 1–2), because what is said or predicated of it depends on it, the investigation begins with this subject, quickly isolating three candidates: the matter, the compound of matter and form, and the form itself (1029 a 2–3), which is identical to essence (1032 b 1–2). Almost as quickly (1029 a 7–32), the first two candidates are at least provisionally excluded. A—perhaps the —major ground for their exclusion is the primacy dilemma , which we shall now briefly investigate.

The philosophical background to the dilemma is this. If you are a realist about scientific knowledge and truth, as Aristotle is, the structure of your scientific theories must mirror the structure of reality, so that scientific starting-points or first principles, must also be the basic building blocks of reality. Suppose that this is not so. Suppose that your physics tells you that atoms are the basic building blocks of reality and that your psychology tells you that sense-perceptions are the starting-points of scientific knowledge. Then you will face a very severe problem, that of skepticism. For a wedge can be driven between the starting-points of scientific knowledge and reality’s basic building blocks. René Descartes’ famous dreaming argument is one familiar form such a wedge might take. Your sense-perceptions are consistent with your being always asleep and having a very detailed dream.

In B.6, Aristotle introduces a similar problem about the relation between our scientific representation of the world and how the world in itself is structured:

We must … ask whether [the starting-points] are universal or exist in the way we say particulars do. For if they are universal, they will not be substances. For no common thing signifies a this something but a such-and-such sort of thing, whereas substance is a this something.… If then the starting-points are universals, these things follow. But if they are not universals, but [exist] as particulars, they will not be scientifically knowable. For scientific knowledge of all things is universal. Thus there will be other starting-points prior to the starting-points, namely, those that are predicated universally, if indeed there is going to be scientific knowledge of these. (1003 a 7–17)

The basic building blocks of reality, (Aristotelian) science tells us, are particular matter-form compounds. Yet science’s own starting-points are the forms—the universal essences—of such things. There is no science of you, or of me, though there is one of human beings. How, then, can science possibly be reflecting accurately the structure of reality, when its starting-points and those of reality fail so radically to map onto each other? For there is no greater difference, it seems, than that between particulars and universals. The thing to do, then, given that science provides our best access to the nature of reality, is to investigate the universal forms or essences that are basic to it.

Aristotle begins the investigation with the most familiar and widely recognized case, which is the form or essence present in sublunary matter-form compounds. It is announced in Z.3 (1029 b 3–12), but not begun until some chapters later and not really completed until the end of Θ.5. And by then it is with actuality ( entelecheia ) or activity ( energeia ) that form is identified, and matter with potentiality. The science of being qua being can legitimately focus on form, or actuality, then, as the factor common to all substances, and so to all the beings. But unless it can be shown that there is some explanatory connection between the forms of all these substances, the non-fragmentary nature of being itself will still not have been established, and the pictures given to us by the various sciences will, so to speak, be separate pictures, and the being they collectively portray, divided.

The next stage in the unification of being, and the legitimation of the science dealing with it qua being, is effected by an argument in Λ.6 that trades on the identification of form with actuality and matter with potentiality:

If there is something that is capable of moving things or acting on them, but that is not actively doing so, there will not [necessarily] be movement, since it is possible for what has a capacity not to activate it. There is no benefit, therefore, in positing eternal substances, as those who accept the Forms do, unless there is to be present in them some starting-point that is capable of causing change. Moreover, even this is not enough, and neither is another substance beyond the Forms. For if it will not be active, there will not be movement. Further, even if it will be active, it is not enough, if the substance of it is a capacity. For then there will not be eternal movement, since what is potentially may possibly not be. There must, therefore, be such a starting-point, the very substance of which is activity. Further, accordingly, these substances must be without matter. For they must be eternal, if indeed anything else is eternal. Therefore they must be activity. (1071 b 12–22)

Matter-form compounds are, as such, capable of movement and change. The canonical examples of them—perhaps the only genuine or fully fledged ones—are living metabolizing beings (Z.17, 1041 b 29–30). But if these beings are to be actual, there must be substances whose very essence is activity—substances that do not need to be activated by something else.

With matter-form compounds shown to be dependent on substantial activities for their actual being, a further element of vertical unification is introduced into beings, since layer-wise the two sorts of substances belong together. Laterally, though, disunity continues to threaten. For as yet nothing has been done to exclude the possibility of each compound substance having a distinct substantial activity as its own unique activator. Being, in that case, would be a set of ordered pairs, the first member of which would be a substantial activity, the second a matter-form compound, with all its dependent attributes.

In Metaphysics Λ.8 Aristotle initially takes a step in the direction of such a bipartite picture. He asks how many substantial activities are required to explain astronomical phenomena, such as the movements of the stars and planets, and answers that there must be forty-nine of them (1074 a 16). But these forty-nine are coordinated with each other so as to form a system. And what enables them to do so, and to constitute a single heaven, is that there is a single prime mover of all of them:

It is evident that there is but one heaven. For if there are many, as there are many human beings, the starting-point for each will be one in form but in number many. But all things that are many in number have matter, for one and the same account applies to many, for example, human beings, whereas Socrates is one. But the primary essence does not have matter, since it is an actuality. The primary immovable mover, therefore, is one both in account and in number. And so, therefore, is what is moved always and continuously. Therefore, there is only one heaven. (1074 a 31–38)

What accounts for the unity of the heaven, then, is that the movements in it are traceable back to a single cause: the prime or primary mover.

Leaving aside the question of just how this primary mover moves what it moves directly, the next phase in the unification of beings is the one in which the sublunary world is integrated with the already unified superlunary one studied by astronomy. This takes place in Λ.10. One obvious indication of this unification is the dependence of the reproductive cycles of plants and animals on the seasons, and their dependence, in turn, on the movements of the sun and moon (Λ.5, 1071 a 13–16). And beyond even this there is the unity of the natural world itself, which is manifested in the ways in which its inhabitants are adapted to each other:

All things are jointly organized in a way, although not in the same way—even swimming creatures, flying creatures, and plants. And the organization is not such that one thing has no relation to another but rather there is a relation. For all things are jointly organized in relation to one thing—but it is as in a household, where the free men least of all do things at random, but all or most of the things they do are organized, while the slaves and beasts can do a little for the common thing, but mostly do things at random. For this is the sort of starting-point that the nature is of each of them. I mean, for example, that all must at least come to be disaggregated [into their elements]; and similarly there are other things which they all share for the whole. (1075 a 16–25)

Thus the sublunary realm is sufficiently integrated with the superlunary one that we can speak of them as jointly having a nature and a ruler, and as being analogous to an army (1075 a 13) and a household (1075 a 22).

We may agree, then, that the divine substances in the superlunary realm and the compound substances in the sublunary one have prima facie been vertically integrated into a single explanatory system. As a result, when we look at the form of a sublunary matter-form compound, we will find in it the mark of a superlunary activator, just as we do in the case of the various heavenly bodies, and, as in the line of its efficient causes, we find “the sun and its movement in an inclined circle” (1071 a 15–16). Still awaiting integration, though, are mathematical objects, such as numbers. But in Books M and N these are shown to be not substantial starting-points and causes but abstractions from perceptible sublunary beings—they are dependent entities, in other words, rather than self-subsistent ones. Similarly, in Physics II.2 we read:

The mathematician too busies himself about these things [planes, solids, lines, and points], although not insofar as each of them is the limit of a natural body, nor does he get a theoretical grasp on the coincidents of natural bodies insofar as they are such. That is why he separates them. For they are separable in the understanding from movement, and so their being separated makes no difference, nor does any falsehood result from it. (193 b 31–35)

This completes the vertical and horizontal unification of being: attributes depend on substances, substantial matter-form compounds depend on substantial forms, or activities, numbers depend on matter-form compounds.

Beings are not said to be “in accord with one thing,” therefore, as they would be if they formed a single first-order genus, but “with reference to one thing,” namely, a divine substance that is in essence an activity. And it is this more complex unity, compatible with generic diversity, and a genuine multiplicity of distinct first-order sciences, but just as robust and well grounded, that grounds and legitimates the science of being qua being as a single science dealing with a genuine object of study (Γ.2, 1003 b 11–16). The long argument that leads to this conclusion is thus a sort of proof of the existence, and so of the possibility, of the science on which the Metaphysics focuses. It is also the justification for the claim, which we looked at before, that the science of being qua being is in fact theology (1026 a 27–32).

There, then, in the starry heavens above us, are the forty-nine celestial spheres, all moving eternally in fixed circular orbits. The outermost one, which contains all the others, is the primary heaven. Questions immediately arise: (i) how is the primary heaven moved by the primary mover, the primary god? Aristotle gives his response in Λ.7:

There is something [namely, the primary heaven,] that is always moved with an unceasing movement, which is in a circle (and this is clear not from argument alone but also from the facts). So the primary heaven would be eternal. There is, therefore, also something that moves it [namely, the primary god]. But since what is moved and moves something is something medial, there is something that moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and activity. This, though, is the way the object of desire and the intelligible object move things: they move them without being moved. Of these objects, the primary ones are the same. (1072 a 21–27)

Thus the primary heaven is moved by the primary god, in the way that we are moved by a good that we desire. (That this heaven, as well as the other heavenly bodies, are therefore alive is argued for in De Caelo II.12.) But (ii) how can the primary god be such a good? Moreover, (iii) why is he not moved by something else again?

The answer to question (ii) is also found in Λ.7:

Active understanding, though, is intrinsically of what is intrinsically best, and the sort that is to the highest degree best is of what is to the highest degree best. The understanding actively understands itself by partaking of the intelligible object. (For it becomes an intelligible object by touching and understanding one, so that understanding and intelligible object are the same.) For what is receptive of the intelligible object and of the substance is the understanding, and it is active when it possesses it, so that this rather than that seems to be the divine thing that understanding possesses, and contemplation seems to be most pleasant and best. If, then, that good state [of activity], which we are sometimes in, the [primary] god is always in, that is a wonderful thing, and if to a higher degree, that is yet more wonderful. But that is his state. And life, too, certainly belongs to him. For the activity of understanding is life, and he is that activity; and his intrinsic activity is life that is best and eternal. (1072 b 18–28)

What the primary heaven is moved by, then, is the wish to be in the good state of active contemplation that we, when we are happiest, are in, and that the primary god is always in because he just is that activity. Just as we seek the good that the primary god is, so too does the primary heaven and its forty-eight celestial companions.

This brings us to question (iii). When the understanding is actively contemplating something, that something—that intelligible object—is what activates it. So why isn’t that object yet more primary than the primary god? Aristotle gives his answer in Λ.9; the reasoning, though compressed, should now be fairly readily intelligible:

What does it [the primary god] understand? For it is either itself or something else. And if something else, then either always the same thing or sometimes this and sometimes that. Does it, then, make a difference or none at all whether it actively understands the good or some random object? Or are there not certain things that it would be absurd for it to think of? It is clear, therefore, that it actively understands what is most divine and most estimable and does not change [its object], since change would be for the worse, and would already be a sort of movement. First, then, if its substance is not active understanding but rather a capacity [to understand], … it is clear that something else would be more estimable than the understanding, namely, what is understood. And indeed [the capacity] to understand and active understanding will belong even to someone who actively understands the worst thing, so that if this is to be avoided (for there are in fact some things that it is better not to see than to see), the active understanding would not be the best thing. It is itself, therefore, that it understands, if indeed it is the most excellent thing, and the active understanding is active understanding of active understanding ( hê noêsis noêseôs noêsis ). (1074 b 22–35)

God is the understanding that understands himself, because his understanding is like ours would be if we imagine it as being the intelligible equivalent of seeing light without seeing any other visible object. From the inside, then, from the point of view of the subject experiencing it, it is a state of consciousness of a sort familiar from the writings of the great religious mystics, in which both subject and object disappear from an awareness that yet remains fully and truly attentive, fully alive and joyous. Insofar as we have any experience-based evidence of what a beatific state is like, this one surely approximates to it. Were we to experience it or something like it, then, there is some reason to think that we would agree that it is bliss indeed, blessed happiness unalloyed. This is the conclusion Aristotle himself comes to and defends in Nicomachean Ethics X.6–8. Practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom, it follows, have the same ultimate starting-point, the same first principle, so that wisdom, too, is something unified.

Go back now to the primacy dilemma and notice that its resolution is within our grasp, though one might be forgiven for not readily understanding Aristotle’s statement of it in M.10:

The fact that all scientific knowledge is universal, so that the starting-points of beings must also be universal and not separate substances, involves the greatest puzzle of those mentioned. But though there is surely a way in which what is said is true, there is another way in which it is not true. For scientific knowledge, like knowing scientifically, is twofold, one potential, the other active: the capacity [or potential], being as matter, universal and indefinite, is of what is universal and indefinite, whereas the activity, being definite, is of what is definite—being a this something of a this something. But it is only coincidentally that sight sees universal color, because this [particular instance of] color that it sees is a color, and so what the grammarian theoretically grasps, namely, this [particular instance of] A, is an A. For if the starting-points must be universal, what comes from them must also be universal, as in the case of demonstrations. And if this is so, there will be nothing separable and no substance either. However, in one way scientific knowledge is universal, but in another it is not. (1087 a 10–25)

The idea is this. Since forms or essences are universals, you and I may both know the same form, as we may both know the letter A. But when I actively know or contemplate that universal form, what is now before my mind is a particular: this actualization of that universal. Now consider the primary god. He is eternally and essentially the object of the active understanding that he is. So he is a substantial particular. But since he is essentially an activity, he is also a universal essence of a special sort—one that can only be actual, never merely potential. In a way, then, the primary god overcomes the difference between particulars and universals that seemed unbridgeable. For he is at once a concrete particular and the starting-point of all scientific knowledge. He thereby unifies not just being, but the scientific knowledge of it as well, insuring that the latter fits the former in the way that realism requires.

• accident: sumbebêkos
• accidental: kata sumbebêkos
• account: logos
• activity: energeia
• actuality: entelecheia
• alteration: alloiôsis
• affirmative: kataphatikos
• assertion: apophansis (sentence with a truth value, declarative sentence)
• assumption: hupothesis
• attribute: pathos
• axiom: axioma
• being(s): on , onta
• belong: huparchein
• category: katêgoria
• cause: aition , aitia
• change: kinêsis , metabolê
• come to be: gignesthai
• coming to be: genesis
• contradict: antiphanai
• contradiction: antiphasis (in the sense “contradictory pair of propositions” and also in the sense “denial of a proposition”)
• contrary: enantion
• definition: horos , horismos
• demonstration: apodeixis
• denial (of a proposition): apophasis
• dialectic: dialektikê
• differentia: diaphora ; specific difference, eidopoios diaphora
• distinctive: idios , idion
• essence: to ti ên einai , to ti esti
• essential: en tôi ti esti , en tôi ti ên einai (of predications); kath’ hauto (of attributes)
• exist: einai
• explanation: aition , aitia
• final cause: hou heneka (literally, “what something is for”)
• form: eidos , morphê
• formula: logos
• function: ergon
• genus: genos
• homonymous: homônumon
• immediate: amesos
• impossible: adunaton
• in respect of itself: kath’ hauto
• individual: atomon , tode ti
• induction: epagôgê
• infinite: apeiron
• kind: genos , eidos
• knowledge: epistêmê
• matter: hulê
• movement: kinêsis
• nature: phusis
• negation (of a term): apophasis
• particular: en merei , epi meros (of a proposition); kath’hekaston (of individuals)
• peculiar: idios , idion
• per se: kath’ hauto
• perception: aisthêsis
• perplexity: aporia
• possible: dunaton , endechomenon ; endechesthai (verb: “be possible”)
• potentially: dunamei
• potentiality: dunamis
• predicate: katêgorein (verb); katêegoroumenon (“what is predicated”)
• predication: katêgoria (act or instance of predicating, type of predication)
• principle: archê (starting point of a demonstration)
• qua: hêi
• quality: poion
• quantity: poson
• refute: elenchein ; refutation, elenchos
• separate: chôriston
• said in many ways: pollachôs legetai
• science: epistêmê
• soul: psuchê
• species: eidos
• specific: eidopoios (of a differentia that “makes a species”, eidopoios diaphora )
• subject: hupokeimenon
• substance: ousia
• term: horos
• this: tode ti
• universal: katholou (both of propositions and of individuals)
• wisdom: sophia
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Aristotle, General Topics: categories | Aristotle, General Topics: logic | Aristotle, General Topics: psychology | Aristotle, Special Topics: causality | Aristotle, Special Topics: natural philosophy

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to István Bodnar for his help in clarifying and improving our presentation, in the supplement on Nonsubstantial Particulars, of Frede’s reading of Aristotle’s definition of ‘in a subject’ ( Cat . 1 a 25), and for stressing the underlying similarity between the Frede and Owen readings.

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What Is Metaphysics?

Learn about this topic in these articles:, influence on sartre.

…Heidegger’s Was ist Metaphysik? (1929; What Is Metaphysics? ), in fact, are copied literally. The meaning of nothingness, which Heidegger in this lecture made the theme of his investigations, became for Sartre the guiding question. Sartre departs from Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein and introduces the position of consciousness (which Heidegger had…

views on existence and nothingness

…work, Was ist Metaphysik? (1929; What Is Metaphysics? ), Heidegger affirmed that “Human existence cannot have a relationship with being unless it remains in the midst of nothingness.” Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the movement known as logical positivism, in an equally famous essay, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch die logische…

The aim and scope of scientific metaphysics

Don Ross, James Ladyman, and Harold Kincaid (eds): Scientific metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, x+243pp, £30.65 HB

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• Published: 09 July 2013
• Volume 23 , pages 117–123, ( 2014 )

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Ladyman, James, Don Ross, David Spurret, and John Collier. 2007. Everything must go. Metaphysics naturalized . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Maudlin, Tim. 2007. The metaphysics within physics . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Ross, Don. 2012. Will scientific philosophy still be philosophy? Academia.edu. http://www.academia.edu/948847/Will_scientific_philosophy_still_be_philosophy . Accessed 20 May 2013. Forthcoming in Recherches sur la philosophie et le langage.

Van Fraassen, Bas. 2002. The empirical stance . New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Soto, C. The aim and scope of scientific metaphysics. Metascience 23 , 117–123 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-013-9822-2

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Published : 09 July 2013

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-013-9822-2

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Metaphysics in Ancient Philosophy Essay

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Philosophy as a science, first of all, sets itself the task of knowing the world. Different philosophers often reformulate this problem; however, the initial essence remains the same. Among other things, the reason is that this question was embedded in philosophy from the very beginning. Even the most famous philosophers of antiquity, including Plato and Aristotle, studied it. However, many of them had their view of the structure of the world. This essay aims to compare and contrast the theories of cognition of reality or metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle.

First of all, it should be noted that although the views of these two philosophers are significantly different, they are in some way dependent on each other. Plato was a teacher for Aristotle, so his work was a starting point for further research and criticism in many ways. This factor, along with others, determines the importance of Plato’s essential work in the context of knowledge of the world – his theory of Ideas or Forms. The philosopher has developed this concept for a long time, and reflections on this topic are found in his various dialogues. Its central idea is Forms — authentic essences outside space and time and are inaccessible for complete understanding by ordinary people (Gracie). According to Plato, objects of the physical world we observe are only a rough semblance of actual Forms. For example, in the dialogue Phaedo, he cites the concept of absolute justice, beauty and kindness (Plato). Although they exist in the world, no one can contemplate them in reality since they are only ideal examples.

Aristotle’s approach was undoubtedly based on the theory of Plato. Despite all the criticism, even in the later works of the philosopher, elements of Platonism were traced. For example, although he rejected the theory of Forms, he continued to use the very concept of form, only giving it a different meaning (Duignan). His further development of this concept led to the emergence of one of the main areas of philosophy – metaphysics. In this collection of books, the philosopher develops the concept of ideas, rejecting the independent existence of forms from specific objects. Instead, according to Aristotle, the forms inherent in an object are closely related to the purpose of the given object, which was given to it by the creator (Aristotle). Thus, the form of an object exists within it and is inextricably linked with it. In this case, the physical shell of the object may not have any meaning. The eyes of various creatures have a different appearances, but the form and purpose are the same – the provision of vision.

The main differences between the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle are based precisely on the theory of forms. Both philosophers interpreted this concept in different ways, and while Plato understood this concept as an unattainable ideal, Aristotle closely linked the form and purpose of the object. At the same time, the form of Aristotle is not a permanently existing concept: it obtains a connection with the object when it acquires the necessary purpose (Duignan). Although these differences are fundamental, since Plato and Aristotle were in close contact as teachers and students, many intersecting ideas and thoughts exist. Missing elements and gaps can be found in the theories of both philosophers, which are not explained by their statements. However, both thinkers believed that the world has an ultimatum truth that explains everything.

Thus, in the approaches of Plato and Aristotle, there are quite a lot of differences in understanding the world around them. Plato created his theory of Ideas or Forms, understanding a particular eternal essence that explains the basic ideas inaccessible to man. Aristotle rejected this approach, developing a much more mundane concept of the relationship between the form and purpose of an object. However, despite mutual criticism, philosophers agreed in their belief that everything in the world can be explained by some higher design.

Works Cited

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. The Internet Classics Archive, Web.

Duignan, Brian. ” Plato and Aristotle: How Do They Differ?” Encyclopædia Britannica, Web.

Gracie, Jade. “Comparing the Similarities and Differences Between Plato and Aristotle.” Owlcation, 2020, Web.

Plato. Phaedo. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive, Web.

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The Role of Metaphysics in Philosophy

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Introduction, what is metaphysics, why is metaphysics important.

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Newton's Metaphysics: Essays

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This collection of papers by a leading philosophical Newton scholar offers new interpretations of Newton’s account of space, gravity, motion, inertia, and laws—all evergreens in the literature. The volume also breaks new ground in focusing on Newton’s philosophy of time, Newton’s views on emanation, and Newton’s modal metaphysics. In addition, the volume is unique in exploring the very rich resonances between Newton’s and Spinoza’s metaphysics, including the ways in which Newton and his circles responded to the threat by, and possible accusation of, Spinozism. Seven chapters have been published before and will be republished with minor corrections. Two of these chapters are coauthored: one with Zvi Biener and one with Mary Domski. Two chapters are wholly new and are written especially for this volume. In addition, the volume includes two postscripts with new material responding to critics. A main part of the argument of these essays is not just to characterize the conceptual choices Newton made in developing the structure of theory that would facilitate the kind of measurements characteristic of the Newtonian style, but also to show that these choices, in turn, were informed by intellectual aspirations that brought Newton’s edifice into theological and philosophical conflicts. As these conflicts became acute, these drove further conceptual refinement. Many of the essays in the volume relate the development of Newton’s philosophy to the philosophies of his contemporaries, especially Spinoza and Samuel Clarke.

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