Many of the issues Aristotle deals with-such as existence, essence, individuation, identity, Universals, the nature of material objects, just to mention a few-are certainly issues that we would comfortably describe as metaphysical. In many ways it would not be incorrect to describe Aristotle’s project in the Metaphysics as metaphysics. Although the Metaphysics is not a unified work in our sense, it seems undeniable that the different treatises of the collection pursue a general philosophical project or discipline, which Aristotle variously refers to as “wisdom,” “first philosophy” or even “theology.” Such a discipline is described in the Metaphysics as a theoretical science, as opposed to practical and productive sciences, and is sharply distinguished from the other two theoretical sciences, physics and mathematics. The collection is most likely to have been put together by Andronicus or someone else on the basis of the thematic similarities among the individual treatises. Aristotle, however, is not responsible for assembling the books of the Metaphysics into a single work. Metaphysics ( ta meta ta phusika) means “the things after the physical things” and may point to the position of the metaphysical books in the Hellenistic edition of Aristotle’s works (after the physical books) or possibly to the order in which metaphysical issues should be learned in an ideal curriculum (after the study of physics). The title is not by Aristotle and is due to a Hellenistic editor, traditionally identified with Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BCE). Aristotle’s Metaphysics, one of the most influential works in Western thought, is a collection of fourteen treatises or books.

Aristotles metaphysics