Ancient Philosophy · Part 17 · Athens · C1
Aristotle III: Physics and Metaphysics
Part 17 of Ancient Philosophy: in the Physics, Aristotle asked what change is and why things happen; in the books that editors placed after it, he asked what it means for anything to exist at all, and found at the top of everything an unmoved mover, thinking about its own thinking. Nominalisation (move → motion, actual → actuality, exist → existence), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the hardest book of the ancient world: the Metaphysics.
Literally, “after the physics”: the books an editor put after Aristotle’s Physics. Aristotle never used the word.
And the editor is almost our neighbour in time: his edition is only a few decades old.
Yes. And the story of how those books survived is almost as strange as what they say.
Aristotle’s Physics is not physics in the modern sense; it studies nature: things that have in themselves a source of movement and rest, like plants, animals and the elements. It asks what change is, and what causes it.
The fourteen books later called the Metaphysics study what Aristotle called “first philosophy”: being as being, what it means for anything to exist, what a substance is, and what the first cause of everything must be. The work begins with a famous sentence: “All human beings by nature desire to know.”
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