Aristotle (384–322 bc) Greek philosopher born in Stagira.
Aristotle’s writings can be said to have set the agenda for the western tradition in metaphysics. Indeed, “meta-physics” is a term derived from a first century bc edition of Aristotle’s work, in which a collection of his writings was put together under the title Ta Meta ta Phusika, which means simply “What comes after the writings on nature” (ta phusika). Since the writings thus put together concerned topics that seemed in certain ways related – substance and being, change and explanation, unity and plurality, potentiality and actuality, non-contradiction, the nature of the eternal and unchanging – these topics were sub-sequently taken to be the subject matter of “metaphysics”, which increasingly became a separate department of philosophy. But Aristotle himself did not group these topics together. He does have a conception of “the study of being qua being” – the study of what is true of all things that are, as such – that links some of the contents of the Metaphysics. But there is dispute about what that study is, and how much of the work it includes. Nor are Aristotle’s inquiries into the topics we now call metaphysical confined to the work called Metaphysics. There is an especially close link between that work and his inquiries into natural change and explanation….
-This article is about Aristotle’s ideas about metaphysics, which was translated into Persian by Sedigheh Bayat.
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