Metaphysics

The fundamental nature of being and the world is the core for the explanation of Metaphysics. Though the term Metaphysics can’t easily be defined, it is the branch of philosophy which sincerely attempts to answer two basic questions.  One what is there? And the other one what is it like?

Metaphysician or metaphysicist is the name of the person who studies metaphysics. The duty of the metaphysician is to identify and clarify the basic notions by which people of the world understand it not excluding the space, time, property, causality, existence and possibility.

Ontology is the central branch of the metaphysics which deals with experimentation of the fundamental categories of being. It investigates how human beings relate to each other. Natural philosophy dominated the major part of metaphysics before the modern history of science. Natural philosophy addressed major scientific questions. Originated from epistemology the term science itself is bound to mean knowledge. The natural philosophy is turned to be an empirical activity by the scientific activity which is derived from experiment unlike the other fields of philosophy. In order to distinguish it from philosophy the name “science” was given to it by the end of the eighteenth century. And from that time onwards the philosophical enquiry into the nature of existence by a non-empirical character has become the sole meaning of metaphysics.

Reckoning the origin of metaphysics, the term “metaphysics is derived from the Greek words meta which meant “beyond” and “after”, and physika which meant physics. The works of Aristotle started using it as the title. But Aristotle never called these books as Metaphysics instead he called them as first philosophy. It was only the editor of his works like Andronicus of Rhodes got an idea of placing the books right after Physics in the first philosophy and thereby it was called as metaphysics (the books that comes after the books on physics). The interesting part of the story is that the Latin scholiasts that came after that misread it and started thinking it as the science that is beyond the physical part. And thereby the metaphysics came to mean such way.

Though the name was given in an inappropriate way, once it was given no one can change. So, the commentators looked after to find the intrinsic reasons that are beyond it and sought after the appropriateness in it.

There were three parts in Aristotle’s Metaphysics namely; Ontology(the study of Being ) natural theology (study of God) and Universal Science (study of first principles)

Questions:

• What is Metaphysics?
• What are the three parts of Aristotle’s Metaphysics?