Encyclopedia of Philosophy: METAPHYSICS (the system of aristotle)

« study something as a being is to study something about which true predications can be made, precisely from thepoint of view of the possibility of making true predications of it.

Aristotle's first philosopher is not making a study ofsome particular kind of being; he is studying everything, the whole of Being, precisely as such. Now an Aristotelian science is a science of causes, so that the science of Being qua being will be a science whichassigns the causes of there being any truths whatever about anything.

Can there be such causes? It is not toodifficult to give sense to a particular being's having a cause qua being.

If I had never been conceived, there wouldnever have been any truths about me; Aristotle says that if Socrates had never existed neither ‘Socrates is well'nor ‘Socrates is unwell' would ever have been true.

So my parents who brought me into existence are causes of me,qua being.

(They are, of course, also causes of me qua human.) So also are their parents, and their parents in turn,and ultimately, Adam and Eve, if we are all descended from a single pair.

And if there was anything which producedAdam and Eve, that would be the cause of all human beings, qua beings.We can see from this clearly enough how the Christian God, the maker of the world, could be regarded as the causeof Being qua being – the cause, in his own existence, of truths about himself, and as creator the efficient cause ofthe possibility of any truth about anything else.

But what is the cause of Being qua being in Aristotle's system, inwhich there is no maker of the world?At the supreme point of Aristotle's hierarchy of beings are the moved and unmoved movers which are the finalcauses of all generation and corruption.

They are therefore in one respect the causes of all perceptible andcorruptible beings, in so far as they are beings.

The science which reaches up to the unmoved mover will bestudying the explanation of all true predication whatever, and therefore will be studying every being qua being.

Inhis Metaphysics Aristotle explains that there are three kinds of substances: perishable bodies, eternal bodies, andimmutable beings.

The first two kinds belong to natural science and the third to first philosophy.

Whatever explainssubstances, he says, explains all things; since without substances there would be neither active nor passivechange.

He then goes on to prove the existence of an unmoved mover; and concludes ‘on such a principle theheavens and nature depend' – i.e.

eternal bodies and perishable bodies alike depend on immutable being.

And this isthe divine, the object of theology.The unmoved mover is prior to other substances and substances are prior to all other beings.

‘Prior' is here used notin a temporal sense, but to denote dependency: A is prior to B if you can have A without B and you cannot have Bwithout A.

If there was no unmoved mover, there would be no heavens and no nature; if there were no substancesthere would be no other beings.

We can see now why Aristotle says that what is prior has greater explanatorypower than what is posterior, and why the science of the divine beings can be said to be the most universalscience because it is prior: it deals with beings which are prior, i.e.

further back in the chain of dependence.

Thescience of divine beings is more universal than the science of physics because it explains both divine beings andnatural beings; the science of physics explains only natural beings and not also divine beings.We can at last see how the different definitions of first philosophy cohere together.

Any science can be definedeither by giving the field it is to explain, or by specifying principles by which it explains.

First philosophy is universalin its field: it undertakes to offer one kind of explanation of everything whatever, to assign one of the causes of thetruth of every true predication.

It is the science of Being qua being.

But if we turn from the explicandum to theexplicans, we can say that first philosophy is the science of the divine; for what it explains, it explains by referenceto the divine unmoved mover.

It does not deal just with a single kind of Being, for it gives an account not only ofthe divine itself, but of everything else that exists or is anything.

But it is par excellence the science of the divine,because it explains everything not, like physics, by reference to nature, but by reference to the divine.

Thustheology and the science of Being qua being are one and the same first philosophy.One is sometimes invited to believe that the final stage in the understanding of Aristotle's metaphysics is anappreciation of the profound and mysterious nature of Being qua Being.

Rather, the first step towards such anunderstanding is the realization that Being qua Being is a chimerical spectre engendered by inattention to Aristotle'slogic.. »