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... rse He believed that there are large, but calculable number of things that for the most part belong to classes, for example, plant and animal species. In most cases the individual members of these classes are born and die, but the classes themselves do not change. The main questions What is being? and What is an individual?
became the prime focus of Aristotle. A horse, a man, a house are classified as such, and an individual, is this the distinguishing feature of his / hers classification. Aristotle himself believed that these classification or labels were earned through experiences, and thought that the groups and classes of things are there to be studied by the act of observation. From the point of his logic, to be meant for him something that could be accurately defined, and that could therefore become the subject of discourse.
To be, as Aristotle saw, always meant to be something. Hence all existence is individual and has a determined nature. All categories Aristotle dealt with in his logical works, categories such as quality, relation, posture, place, etc... presuppose some subject to which these predicates can apply (p. 171). The subject to which all the categories apply Aristotle called substances. To be, then, is to be a particular kind of substance.
Also to be means to be the substance as the product of a dynamic process. In this way, metaphysics is concerned with Being and its causes. Aristotle also takes up the questions in metaphysics beyond those of physical nature, but moves into Another part of metaphysics that must be analyzed is Aristotle's thought on theology. Aristotle tells about three kinds of substances, those that are sensible and perishable, those that are sensible but not perishable, and those that are neither sensible nor perishable. The first class includes plants and animals, the second class includes the heavenly bodies the third includes the rational soul in man and also God. The main argument for God is the First cause: there must be something which originates motion, and this something must itself be unmoved, and eternal, substance and actuality.
The object of desire and the object of thought, Aristotle states, cause movement in this way with out themselves being in motion, so God produces motion by being loved. God is a pure thought; for thought is what is best. Life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God Gods self dependent actuality is life most The conception of an unmoved mover (God) is a difficult one, but to understand what Aristotle really means, one must understand his thought on the four causes material, formal, efficient, and final. Let us take again the man who is making a statue. The material cause of the statue is the marble, the formal cause is the essence of the statue to be produced, the efficient cause the contact of the chisel with the marble and the final cause the end that the sculptor has in view (p. 155). The unmoved mover may be regarded as the final cause; it supplies a purpose for change, which is an evolution towards the likeness with God.
God exists eternal, as a pure thought, happiness and complete self-fulfillment. Thus God is the final cause of all activity. The Neoplatonists in the late classical period continued to investigate the concept of metaphysics, and were of great importance in medieval philosophy since they formed a link between medieval and ancient philosophy. The main figure was Plotinus (c. 204 - 270), who combined metaphysics with mysticism.
The mystical and religious side of metaphysics became even more popular when Neoplatonists such as Iamblichus and Proclus came into the picture, and gave a more religious connotation to its meaning. Plotinus philosophy begins with the assumptions that being and unity are properties that things have. The Plotinus assumption is that properties are entities, the theory of categories or types of predictions is a theory of kinds of predicates: genus, species, difference, property, and accident (p. 155). These kind of predicates are distinguished from individuals, and this account of predication makes a distinction between thing and property peripheral to metaphysics (p. 154). Soon one witnesses that Neoplatonism takes on a religious interpretation as we move to the middle ages. Classical metaphysics was the standard of metaphysics in general.
However during the history of West European philosophy the evaluation of metaphysical knowledge, as well as the place of metaphysics in philosophical changed. The medieval theologists (scholastics), believed tha metaphysics can concise God, and this can be done by analogy. Medieval metaphysics was a detailed interpretation of problems such as freedom, necessity, the nature of general concepts etc... , and essentially this concept enriched the conceptual and terminological meaning of In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, new ways of thinking in metaphysics were being prepared as the works by Aristotle were translated from Greek into Latin. The man who took the concept of metaphysics to the next level was St. Thomas Aquinas. He attempted to explain the destinations between essence and existence, necessary and contingent existence.
For Aquinas common sense things like a horse and houses do exist in a literal and straight forward sense apart from human observation, and also apart from God. He believed that ordinary things we experience are outside of nature, they fall into the hands of God, who exists by his own nature, and God is immaterial, and hence is one and unchanging. Aquinas believed that human beings exist in their own right, by virtue of a delegated Well as one comes to conclusion, one must recap on the concept and the origin of metaphysics. Metaphysics is a intricate branch of philosophy that tries to analyze the nature of rarity.
It literally means after the physics, and so rightly named because Aristotle's book on the subject followed his physics, dealing with nature of the ordinary world, which in Classical Greek is physics. The actual definition of metaphysics is a division of philosophy that concerned with fundamental nature of reality and being and includes ontology -- study of what is outside objective experience, cosmology and often epistemology (Websters 94). Through the years metaphysical theories fell into two kinds: that view everything in nature as the result of Mind and those that view the Mind as the result of mechanisms of Nature. One can understand metaphysics as a philosophically of the world distinct from a scientific understanding. Metaphysics is a method which is opposite to that of dialectics, it is the science of supersensible principles Bertrand, Rule. A History of Western Philosophy.
Simon and Schuster; New Coplescton, Fredrick. A History of Philosophy. Image Books; New York: Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy. Simon and Schuster; New York: 1926.
Hutchins, Robert. Great Books of the Western World. William Benton; Magill, Frank. Masterpieces of Wolds Philosophy.
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