Metaphysics
c. 340 BCE · Aristotle
Core ideas
- Metaphysics studies being as such and the first causes of things.
- The four causes explain why anything is as it is.
- Change is the passage from potentiality to actuality.
- An unmoved mover is the ultimate source of all motion.
Summary
The Metaphysics investigates 'being as being' — what it means for anything to exist at all. Aristotle surveys earlier thinkers, then develops his own account of substance as the primary kind of being, analyzed through the interplay of form and matter and the four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final).
He distinguishes potentiality from actuality to explain change, and argues that the chain of motion in the cosmos requires an unmoved mover — a fully actual being that causes motion as an object of desire rather than by pushing. The treatise founds metaphysics as the study of first principles underlying every other inquiry.