Work · Aristotle
Metaphysics
c.330 BCE · Fourteen books
What does it mean for anything to exist? A climb from the four causes to a single eternal mind that moves the whole cosmos by being loved.
14
Books
4th c. BCE
Written
Being itself
On
The four causes
Aristotle’s master tool: the little word “why?” is secretly four questions, and you haven’t explained a thing until you’ve answered all four — above all what it’s for. (The worked statue example is from his Physics; the four-cause scheme runs through the Metaphysics.)
The shape of the argument
Books I–II
The itch to understand, and the four causes — the four-part answer to every “why.”
Book I
Where the earlier philosophers, Plato included, each saw only part of the picture.
Book IV
What this science even is: the study of being as being, resting on the one rule thought can’t do without.
Books VII–VIII
The question under all questions — “what is being?” becomes “what is substance?”: form, matter, essence.
Book IX
Potentiality and actuality: how anything passes from what it could be to what it actually is.
Book XII
The summit: the unmoved mover, a mind that moves the whole cosmos by being loved.
The cast
Being qua being — the subject — what it is for anything to exist at all
The four causes — the four-part answer to every “why” — Aristotle’s master tool
Substance (ousia) — the primary kind of being; “what is being?” reduces to “what is substance?”
Potentiality & actuality — the pair that explains all change — and actuality comes first
The unmoved mover — the eternal mind that moves the world by being loved, thinking only of itself
The famous bits
“All men by nature desire to know”Book I
The most famous opening in philosophy — and he proves it from something as ordinary as our love of looking.
The four causesBook I
The little word “why?” is secretly four questions; you haven’t explained anything until you’ve answered all four.
Being as beingBook IV
Every other science studies a slice of reality; this one studies existence itself.
What is substance?Book VII
The oldest question there is — “what is being?” — turns out to be a question about which things are the real ones.
The unmoved moverBook XII
The thing that moves the whole universe never moves; it draws everything the way a beloved draws you across a room, and thinks only about thinking.