Led by Aristotle
About this course
The Metaphysics paper begins with the question that defines the subject: not which things exist, but what it is for anything to be at all. This first module takes it up with the philosopher who first marked metaphysics off as a discipline — Aristotle, as logician and metaphysician.
Aristotle calls it "first philosophy": the science of being qua being, of whatever holds of things simply insofar as they are, as distinct from physics (which studies changeable things) and mathematics (which studies quantity). His central move — that "being" is said in many ways, all referring back to one primary case, substance — both makes a unified science of being possible and dissolves the puzzle of how being can be one thing and many things at once. From there he lays out the ten categories, the primacy of substance, and the principle of non-contradiction, and stakes his great disagreement with Plato: the truly real is not a separate realm of Forms but the individual substances of the world we live in.
The student leaves with the working apparatus of the whole paper — being qua being, the focal unity of being, the categories, the primacy of substance, the defence of non-contradiction, and the Plato–Aristotle dispute over universals — and reads Aristotle's Categories and Metaphysics (Books IV and VII) directly.
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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.