Few works have shaped the history of philosophy as profoundly as Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In this foundational text, Aristotle asks the deepest questions human reason can pose: What does it mean for something to exist? What is substance? What are cause, form, matter, potentiality, and actuality? And is there a first principle behind all things?
Moving beyond the study of nature, Aristotle investigates “being as being,” laying the groundwork for centuries of metaphysical, theological, and scientific thought. His reflections on essence, change, causality, and the “Unmoved Mover” became central to medieval philosophy, Christian theology, Islamic and Jewish thought, and the entire Western intellectual tradition. Demanding, rigorous, and endlessly influential, Metaphysics remains one of the great monuments of philosophical inquiry. It is a book for readers who wish to confront the ultimate foundations of reality and enter into dialogue with one of the most powerful minds of antiquity. A timeless classic for students, scholars, and all readers interested in philosophy, ontology, and the search for first principles.
Aristotle (384–322 BC) was one of the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece and one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Western thought. A student of Plato and later tutor to Alexander the Great, he wrote on an extraordinary range of subjects, including logic, ethics, politics, biology, rhetoric, poetry, physics, and metaphysics.
His works laid the foundations for many disciplines and shaped philosophical, scientific, and theological reflection for more than two thousand years. In Metaphysics, Aristotle explores the deepest questions concerning being, substance, causality, change, actuality, potentiality, and the first principles of reality.
