Work · Ancient Greek
Metaphysics
Being qua being, substance and the unmoved mover – with a critique of Plato's Forms.
Introduction
Fourteen books of varying origin, assembled after Aristotle’s death. The title probably goes back to the edition of Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century BCE, where these books came “after the Physics” (meta ta physika); Aristotle speaks of “first philosophy”. It opens with “All human beings by nature desire to know.” Book IV defends the principle of non-contradiction; Books VII–IX ask what substance is and introduce the pair potentiality and actuality; Book XII describes the unmoved mover as thought thinking itself. Through Arabic and Latin commentaries the work gave the whole discipline its name. Avicenna reported that he read it forty times before he understood it.
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Connections
Builds on
- Parmenidesc. 370 BCE · Plato
Criticizes
- Phaedoc. 380 BCE · Plato
Taken up in
- Enneadsc. 270 · Plotinus
- On First Philosophyc. 840 · al-Kindi
- The Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa)c. 1027 · Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
- The Guide for the Perplexedc. 1190 · Maimonides
- Long Commentaries on Aristotlec. 1190 · Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
- Summa theologiae1273 · Thomas Aquinas
- Metaphysical Disputations1597 · Francisco Suárez
- Being and Time1927 · Martin Heidegger
- The Semantic Conception of Truth1944 · Alfred Tarski
Criticized in
- Collations on the Six Days (Collationes in Hexaemeron)1273 · Bonaventure
- On the Differences between Aristotle and Plato (De differentiis)1439 · George Gemistos Plethon
- On Essence1962 · Xavier Zubiri
More works by Aristotle
- c. 350 BCEOn the Soul (De anima)
- c. 350 BCEOrganon
- c. 350 BCEPhysics
- c. 340 BCENicomachean Ethics
- c. 335 BCEPoetics
- c. 335 BCEPolitics
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