PHIL 110 · Metaphysics — What There Is

Led by Aristotle

The opening module of the Cambridge Part IA Metaphysics paper, led by Aristotle. What is it for anything to be at all? Aristotle marks off metaphysics as the science of being qua being, shows that "being" is said in many ways with substance as its primary case, sets out the ten categories, defends the principle of non-contradiction, and inverts Plato — the primary realities are the individual things of experience, not separated Forms. The module hands the student the apparatus the rest of the paper uses.

1. Module 1 ○ Open

   What There Is: Being, Ontology, and First Philosophy

   Led by Aristotle

   The question

   What is it for anything to *be* — and is "being" one thing or many? Before we can ask which things exist, Aristotle argues, we must ask what we are even claiming when we say that something *is*; and his answer reshapes the question. "Being" is said in many ways — substances, qualities, quantities, relations — but all of them by reference to one primary case, substance, the thing that exists in its own right while everything else exists only as a feature of it. The module marks metaphysics off from the other sciences, sets out the categories of being and the principle of non-contradiction that governs all thought about them, and joins Aristotle in his foundational quarrel with Plato over whether the real is the universal Form or the individual thing.

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