The Science Without A Name

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Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

Volume 29, Number 2, 2008
The Science without a Name
Pierre Aubenque
1. KCR? R? DSQGI?
So bleibt Metaphysik der Titel für die Verlegenheit

der Philosophie schlechthin.
—Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik1
1.1
“There is a science that studies being qua being and what belongs
to it essentially.”2 This assertion of Aristotle’s at the beginning of book
E of the Metaphysics may seem banal after more than twenty centuries
of metaphysical speculation. It certainly was not for his contempo-
raries. It may even be that Aristotle’s assertiveness in resolutely posit-
ing the existence of such a science reveals less an observation than it
betrays an unfulfilled wish. The insistence he makes in the following
lines to justify a science of being qua being—while such a concern does
not appear when it comes to “particular” sciences—shows, in any case,
that the legitimacy and the meaning of this new science was not self-
evident to his listeners, nor perhaps even to him.
Such a science was without ancestors and without tradition. It suf-
fices to refer to the classifications of knowledge in fashion before
Aristotle to perceive that no place was reserved for what today we call
“ontology.” Platonists generally divided speculative knowledge into
three branches: dialectics, physics, and morality.3 Xenocrates, according
to Sextus Empiricus,4 would have substituted logic for dialectics, and
Originally published as the introduction to Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de

l’être chez Aristote: Essai sur la problématique aristotélicienne, 2nd ed. (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), pp. 21–68. The editors gratefully
acknowledge permission granted by the author and Presses Universitaires de
France to publish this translation.
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GRADUATE FACULTY PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL
Aristotle himself, in a text where he is still under the Platonic influence,

the Topics, retains this division, which must have become traditional in
the school: “To limit ourselves to a simple outline, let us distinguish
three types of propositions and questions, first ethical, then physical,
and, finally, logical” (Top. I.14, 105b20). Admittedly, Aristotle presents
this division as an approximation he maintains to substitute later on
with a more scientific classification.
Strangest of all is that this tripartite division, which gives no place to
“metaphysical” speculations,5 outlived Aristotelianism, as if Aristotle’s
efforts to create a new science were neglected or disregarded by his suc-
cessors. The method is known by which the Stoics delineated and
divided the entire field of philosophy: a field where physics is the
ground, logic is the fence, and morality is the fruit.6 Diogenes Laertius,
a hardly intelligent, though accurate interpreter of the standard philo-
sophical tradition, took up the Platonic and Stoic division, as though it
went without saying: “Philosophy has three parts: physics, ethics, and
dialectic or logic. Physics is the part concerned with the universe and
all that it contains; ethics that is concerned with life and all that has to
do with us; while the process of reasoning employed by both form the
province of dialectic.”7 Furthermore, this same Diogenes Laertius, sum-
marizing Aristotle’s philosophy, found it quite natural to apply it to the
traditional confines: while allowing the Aristotelian distinction between
practical and theoretical philosophy, he subdivides the first into ethics
and politics, and the second into physics and logic,8 which duplicates to
a close degree—the dissociation of ethics from politics—the classic divi-
sion.
This persistence of a tradition, which doubtless Aristotle wanted to
modify, reveals in the very least his failure on this point. The science of
being qua being had no ancestors: it would not have immediate poster-
ity. Only Theophrastus, in an aporetic form no less, would take up the
metaphysical questions addressed by his master. From Straton onwards,
the Aristotelian school would be devoted to physical, moral, and, to a
lesser degree, logical speculations, as though therein could be found the
whole of philosophy: not only the legitimacy or the meaning, but the
very existence of questions that are neither physical, moral, nor ethical
would from then on be lost even in a milieu that claimed to feed on
Aristotle’s thought. The science of being qua being, only just born,
would slip for centuries into oblivion.
Upon reflecting on the singular success of the Metaphysics, first with
the neo-Platonist revival, then, following another eclipse, with the
scholastic renaissance of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one
cannot help but notice in this alternation between oblivions and resur-
rections, between underground developments and revivals, the indica-
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AUBENQUE/SCIENCE WITHOUT NAME
tion of a strange intellectual adventure. Moreover, if we believe the more

or less legendary account that was given credence from antiquity onward,
these expressions would hardly be metaphorical. The Romanesque version
given by Strabo and Plutarch is known.9 Aristotle’s and Theophrastus’
manuscripts would have been bequeathed by the latter to his condisciple
Neleus. Neleus’ heirs, an unlearned people, would have buried them in a
Skepsis cave to shield them from the bibliographic eagerness of the
Pergamon kings. Much later, in the first century CE, their descendants
would have sold them at the price of gold to the peripatecian Apellicon of
Teos, who transcribed them. Finally, during the war against Mithridates,
Sylla took over Apellicon’s library, which he transported to Rome, where
it was bought by the grammarian Tyrannion. It is from him that the last
scholarch of the Lyceum, Andronicus of Rhodes, acquired the copies that
allowed him to publish, around 60 CE, the first edition of the “esoteric”
writings of Aristotle and Theophrastus (though the “exoteric” works, pub-
lished by Aristotle himself and lost today, had never ceased to be known).
It is thus owing to a series of fortunate circumstances that the
Aristotelian corpus survived humidity and worms, before being defini-
tively “unearthed” by Andronicus of Rhodes.
Today we tend to hear in this account, following Léon Robin’s
expression,10 a promotional “prospectus,” inspired by Andronicus him-
self to give credence to the completely unknown nature of the texts he
was publishing. It is not likely, actually, that Aristotle’s scientific writ-
ings had been unknown by the Aristotelian school since Straton, no
more than by the opponents of the School (Megarians, Epicureans,
Stoics), who seem to refer to it at times in their polemics.11 Yet we have
perhaps not emphasized enough that Strabo’s account at least has the
merit of quite naturally explaining the philosophical decadence of the
peripatetic school from Straton onwards, and, in particular, his com-
plete silence with regard to metaphysical speculations:
The result was that the earlier school of Peripatetics who came after
Theophrastus had no books at all, with the exception of only a few,
mostly exoterical works, and were therefore able to philosophise
about nothing in a scientific way [mo^dj^qfh¬t], but only to talk
bombast about commonplace propositions.12
Plutarch also, where there was ignorance concerning the works of the
Master, credited it to the deficiencies of the school.
It thus seems that Strabo and Plutarch had wanted to justify the
omissions and deficiencies of the peripatetic school at least as much as
they had wanted to boast the originality of Andronicus. Underlying their
account, one especially discerns the double sentiment of astonishment
and satisfaction that learned contemporaries must have felt as they
beheld the priceless “discovery” that Andronicus’ edition brought them.
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Doubtless, it appeared simplest to grant that, if these writings had car-

ried no influence, this was because they had not been known. Minds
tending toward the romantic would not have hesitated to find there,
under the half-mythical form of burying and unearthing, the story of an
oblivion and a rediscovery that may have had deeper explanations.
Even in taking Strabo’s and Plutarch’s account to the letter, one would
still have to explain how Theophrastus had imprudently bequeathed to
the obscure Neleus a library for which his successor at the Lyceum
would have had better use. If one must really ascribe the responsibility
of this legacy to him, it is because he must have had in circulation
enough copies of Aristotle’s lectures so that this inheritance simply
would not deprive the Lyceum of essential texts. If, finally, Aristotle’s
manuscripts actually did land in the bottom of a cave, it is because
there was no one left to be concerned with them. From whichever angle
the question is approached, the permanence of an organized school at
the Lyceum, destined to prolong the work of Aristotle, prevents believ-
ing in an accidental loss: far from the loss explaining the oblivion, the
oblivion explains the loss, and it is this oblivion that first must be
explained.
For a certain number of Aristotle’s works, we have been able to show
recently that this oblivion was never a total oblivion. In particular, certain
Epicurean texts,13 and maybe even Ciceronian texts,14 can only be
explained through familiarity with Aristotle’s esoteric works, prior even to
Andronicus’ edition. Yet there is a set of treatises of which, after
Theophrastus, no trace is found before the first century CE (or close to one
century after Andronicus’ edition), and for which, consequently, the ques-
tion remains unresolved: this is the body of writings called Metaphysics.
Reasons may be sought to explain this oblivion: the difficulty of the
subject; the abstract nature of speculations on being qua being; the
mental strain needed to conceptualize a being that is not a particular
being. These would already explain that minds less gifted or simply
more practical than their master’s abandoned reading texts early on
that repelled them with their dryness and abstraction, and that, as a
result, metaphysical investigation, deprived of impetus or of the sup-
port it would have found in Aristotelian texts, dried up quickly. Yet
this explanation remains inadequate. It is one thing, for example, to
fail to understand mathematics. It is another thing to consider that
mathematics does not exist. Aristotle’s disciples could have turned
away from metaphysics, all the while reserving it a place in the edifice
of knowledge. In reality, that which was lost for centuries was not only
the understanding of metaphysical questions, but the very meaning of
their existence.15 Of this fundamental oblivion, the persistence of the
Xenocratic division of logic, physics, and morality seems indissolubly to
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be the effect and the cause. It is certainly the effect, since this division
would surely have been revised if metaphysics had been imposed as a
new science. But it is also the cause, in the sense that this division,
which was purported to be exhaustive, had finally permeated minds to
the point of making any new organization of the philosophical domain
psychologically impossible. It seems a phenomenon of “mental block-
age” occurred there, analogous to the one that has been described in
another domain of Greek thought.16 Perhaps it is there that can be
found the fundamental reason for which metaphysical writings were
unknown or unrecognized up until Andronicus of Rhodes. Rather than
bringing about a radical revision of philosophical concepts to make
room for these intruders, sticking to the traditional division was pre-
ferred, even if to the exclusion, first as too obscure, then, with the help
of oblivion, as non-existent, of that which could not be reconciled.
The fact remains that, even in his lifetime, Aristotle failed to pro-
voke this reorganization of the philosophical domain that was implied
by the emergence of a science that for the first time took being as its
proper object, no longer a particular being, but being qua being. It
would still be understandable that Aristotle was unable to impose his
point of view on rival schools, schools that were, nonetheless—in a
domain where the Stagirite was more fortunate—well obliged to recog-
nize him as the founder of logic. However, that Aristotle was unable to
convince his own disciples of the uniqueness of a science of being qua
being, and of the benefits they could gain by devoting themselves to it,
reveals a situation so strange that one might ask if Aristotle himself
did not provoke it. It is tempting here to appeal to the views of Werner
Jaeger on the evolution of Aristotle’s thought:17 According to him, the
metaphysical writings would not date to the last part of Aristotle’s life
(a hypothesis that comes to mind naturally for those who want to
explain their state of incompletion), but would already have been com-
posed at the beginning of Aristotle’s second stay in Athens. In other
words, before having brought them to their end, Aristotle would have
turned away from metaphysical speculations on his own, to devote him-
self to labors of a mostly historical and biological order: the collection of
constitutions, establishment of a list of masters of the Pythian games,
questions of practical physics, observations of animals. Jaeger reveals
Aristotle, at the end of his life, organizing the Lyceum as a center of sci-
entific research. A text from book I of the treatise Parts of Animals
seems to testify to this development: Knowledge of terrestrial things,
prone to becoming and to corruption, does not have less dignity, and it
has in any case more scope and more certainty, than that of eternal and
divine beings. And Aristotle cited in support of this judgment Heraclitus’
response to unknown visitors who, having found him warming himself
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at the fire in his kitchen, hesitated to enter: “Come in; for here, too,
gods dwell [h^◊ †kq^„v^ vbl·t]” (PA I.5, 645a17f.). There is certainly, in
this passage of an introductory nature, the intended design to revalue
knowledge of the human body, of which the young Aristotle did not for-
merly hide his repugnance.18 Yet if it remains true that philosophy,
plc÷^, does not concern itself with that which is born and passes away
(NE VI.13, 1143b19), must not we also see, in this rehabilitation of “ter-
restrial” investigation, the admission of a certain disaffection for this
more than human sagacity, which has the double disadvantage of being
difficult to attain and not directly concerning our condition?
Such is, moreover, the result of Jaeger’s investigations. We should
have to ask ourselves if this interpretation of Aristotle’s career is the
only possible one, and whether the gradual predominance of positive
investigations might signify an expansion of the field of philosophy or a
transmutation of its meaning, at least as much as its abandonment.19
Yet is it not plausible that the disciples had interpreted as a definitive
renouncement on the part of Aristotle the acknowledgement of an awk-
wardness that was, perhaps, essential to metaphysics itself? In any
case, it seems hardly doubtful that the disaffection of the Lyceum for
abstract speculations, and the empirical orientation of its first labors,20
could have found their origin in the preoccupations, perhaps poorly
interpreted, and, in any case, inadequately thought through, of the
aging Aristotle. Thus the external history of the Metaphysics sends us
back to the internal interpretation. Strabo’s and Plutarch’s account
only prolongs, in the form of an anecdote, the drama of a loss and a
rediscovery that first unfolds in the work of Aristotle himself.
1.2
Until now we have spoken of “metaphysics” and of the science of being

qua being, and we have, in accordance with the tradition, provisionally
assimilated these two expressions. In reality, this assimilation does not
go without saying, and deserves examination. It is known that the des-
ignation jbqà qà crpfhá is post-Aristotelian; it is commonly explained
by the obligation Aristotle’s publishers found themselves in to invent a
title, in want of a designation indicated by the Stagirite himself.
Actually, we shall see that such a designation exists: it is that of “first
philosophy” or “theology.” Thus we find ourselves in the presence of
three terms: science of being qua being, first philosophy (or theology),
and metaphysics. Are they synonyms? If they are, why has the tradition
not contented itself with the first two, established by Aristotle himself?
If they are not, what is their relation? Is first philosophy the science of
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being qua being, and if they do not coincide, which one of them is meta-
physics?
The first mention we know of the title jbqà qà crpfhá is found in
Nicolaus of Damascus (first half of the first century CE). That it does
not appear in Diogenes Laertius’ catalogue—the source of which would
be a list dating back to Hermippe or maybe even Aristo of Ceos,21 thus
well before Nicolaus of Damascus—resulted in Aristo’s being attributed
the authorship of this designation (which figures in the later catalogues
by the anonymous writer of the Vita Menagiana and by Ptolemy). The
belated origin of this title long seemed proof enough of its non-
Aristotelian character. It was called a purely extrinsic designation, fol-
lowing the order of writings in Andronicus of Rhodes’ edition.
This traditional interpretation rests on the postulate, contestable on
first appearance, that a consideration of order is necessarily extrinsic
and could not have philosophical importance.22 Yet it was recently
shown that the three former lists of Aristotle’s works rested on a sys-
tematic classification, inspired in part by the Stagirite himself.23 It is
likely that Andronicus of Rhodes’ edition was responding to analogous
preoccupations. Moreover, an account by Philoponus attests to the fact
that the concern with the intrinsic order of teaching and lecturing,
which would become a classic matter of discussion for commentators,
was already present in Andronicus:
Boethus of Sidon says one must begin with physics, because we are
more familiar with it and know it better; for, one must begin with
the most certain and most known. But his teacher, Andronicus of
Rhodes, leaning on a more thorough investigation, said that one
must begin with logic, because it deals with demonstrations.24
In antiquity, the order of Andronicus’ corpus was deemed so far from

arbitrary that Porphyry, in chapter 24 of his On the Life of Plotinus,
would propose to take it as a model in the classification of his master’s
writings.25
If the title Metaphysics had been born randomly, it would be hard to
admire the idea that it had resulted early on in a philosophical inter-
pretation. Kant would be astonished by this coincidence, which, from
an arbitrary designation, would have given a positive indication of the
very contents of the work:
In that which concerns the name of metaphysics, we cannot believe
that is was born randomly, so much does it suit exactly this very sci-
ence: if we call c·pft nature, and if we can only come by concepts on
nature through experience, so the science that follows from this is
called metaphysics (from jbqá, trans, and physica). It is a science
which is found somehow outside, that is, above the domain of
physics.26
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Indeed, the intrinsic interpretation of the title Metaphysics is the

only one that we will encounter in Greek commentators, who, if they
falsely attributed the title to Aristotle himself, should nonetheless have
been better informed than us on the traditions attached to it. This
interpretation is actually of two kinds, following the meaning that we
give to the preposition jbqá.
According to the first kind of interpretation, which we could call
“Platonizing,” the preposition jbqá would signify a hierarchical order in
the object. Metaphysics is the science that has as its object that which is
beyond nature: Âmûo c·pfk or †mùhbfk^ q¬k crpfh¬k. These expressions
cross paths in a treatise by Herrenius, though in a passage, which,
according to Eucken, would be an interpolation of the Renaissance.27
Effectively, this interpretation, already the most common in the middle
ages,28 would become predominant with the rebirth of Platonism. Yet
the idea is already incontestably present in the neo-Platonic commenta-
tors. Thus, we find in Simplicius:
That which deals with things entirely separately from matter [mbo◊
qà usofpqà mákqı q´t Áiet] and the pure activity of the active
intellect . . . they call theology, first philosophy, and metaphysics
[jbqà qà crpfhá], it being given that it has its place beyond physi-
cal things [ƒt †mùhbfk^ q¬k crpfh¬k qbq^djùkek].29
And later on:

On the principle [äou©] of essence, which is separate and exists as
thinkable and not movable . . . , precise investigation is the work of
first philosophy, or, which amounts to the same, of the treatise con-
cerning that which is beyond physical things [q´t Âmûo qà crpfhà
mo^dj^qb÷^t], which he himself calls metaphysics [jbqà qà
crpfhá].30
It has been objected that this interpretation is neo-Platonist. Yet

perhaps it is simply Platonist. In any case, it corresponds no less to one
of the definitions, itself Platonist, that Aristotle gives of the content of
first philosophy. If “something eternal, immobile, and separate” exists,
it would be for first philosophy or, said differently, theology to study it
(Met. C.1, 1026a10f.). For thus is the theological question par excellence:
“Does there or does there not exist, apart from [môá] sensible essences,
an immobile and eternal essence, and if this essence exists, what is
it?”31 Of course, neo-Platonist commentators would transform into a
relation of transcendence (Âmùo) that which seems a simple relation of
separation (môá) in Aristotle. Yet the idea of primacy was already
clearly indicated in the very expression “first philosophy.” If the philos-
ophy of the separate and immobile being is first, without a doubt it is
not only due to its place in the order of knowledge, but also due to the
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ontological dignity of its object. Primacy is also synonymous with emi-

nence: “The most eminent [qfjfsqáqe] science must bear on the most
eminent genus” (Met. C.1, 1026a21), a genus that is the principle
(äou©) of all the rest. In this way, the first science, the science of the
principle, would know a fortiori that of which the principle was princi-
ple and would thus be “universal because first” (Met. C.1, 1026a30).
There was nothing in these theses that a mind of Platonist formation
could not assimilate to his own doctrine. A Platonizing interpretation
was thus so far from arbitrary that it found its justification in certain of
Aristotle’s own texts. Moreover, this interpretation provided a way to
reconcile the “meta-” of “metaphysics” with the primacy attributed by
Aristotle to science and the immobile and separate being.
Such was not, however, the most common interpretation among the
first commentators, who, fastening themselves to the obviate meaning of
“meta,” saw in it an indication of a chronological relation: metaphysics is
so named because it comes “after” physics in the order of knowledge.
The preposition “meta” would no longer signify a hierarchical order in
the object, but an order of succession in knowledge. It is these passages
that have been generally interpreted as revealing, while awkwardly try-
ing to justify it, the accidental origin of the title Metaphysics.32 Yet it is
enough to turn to the texts of the commentators to realize that this jus-
tification and the very order to which it refers are far from arbitrary.
The first mention of this interpretation is found in Alexander of
Aphrodisias, according to whom “wisdom” or “theology” would have
been named “after physics” for the fact that it comes after it in the
order for us (q∂ qágbf . . . moÌt ≠jât).33 As Hans Reiner remarks, “a
qâgft moÌt ≠jât is after all something else from the purely extrinsic
order of a catalogue.”34 Likewise, if Asclepius attributes to considera-
tions of order (afà q™k qágfk) the title Metaphysics,35 he gives this order
a philosophical justification: “Aristotle first dealt with physical things,
for, if they are posterior by nature [q∂ c·pbf], they are not less prior for
us [≠jÿk].”36 This interpretation of the title Metaphysics is thus put, by
the commentators, systematically in relation to the authentic
Aristotelian distinction of priority in itself or by nature and of priority
for us.37 The object of science contemplated is in itself prior to that of
physics, but is posterior to it in relation to us, which justifies at once
both the title of “first philosophy” and that of “metaphysics.”
Whatever system of interpretation was adopted, it seems that the com-
mentators had at heart to justify, in reconciling them, the two titles that
had reached them. They do not seem to have doubted that metaphysics
designated first philosophy38 and had as its object being qua being,
which, moreover, they assimilated to the divine being.39 Yet neither the
commentators nor the modern exegetes seem to have asked themselves
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for what reason the fist publishers of the Metaphysics had to invent
this title, while Aristotle already provided them with one. Admittedly,
the commentators resolved the question by attributing the two titles to
Aristotle himself: not able to attribute it to inconsequence, they were
constrained to considering the two expressions of “metaphysics” and
“first philosophy” as synonymous. Yet, if we allow that of these two
titles only the second is properly Aristotelian, we must ask, not only
what the meaning is of the first, but to what need its invention was
meant to respond.
That there had been, in the origin of the title Metaphysics, “a difficulty
concerning the unbiased understanding of the writings of the corpus
aristotelicum,”40 can no longer be put into doubt. That the publishers
had been disconcerted by the content of a philosophical science that did
not enter into the traditional confines of philosophy; that they had thus
been brought to designate the unknown by reference to the known, and
first philosophy by reference to physics—these reasons can explain the
very letter of the title Metaphysics, but not the advisability of its
employment. For the easy solution would have been, without needing
to understand it, to reproduce a designation of which Aristotle himself
had made a title: in a passage of Movement of Animals (6, 700b7), a
work that we agree today to recognize as authentic, he refers to a trea-
tise, On First Philosophy (qà mbo◊ q´t mo¿qet cfilplc÷^t). In the
absence of Aristotle, Theophrastus could have furnished a title: in the
first lines of the work that publishers would call Metaphysics by way of
analogy with that of Aristotle, it is a question of “speculation on first
principles” (≠ Âmûo q¬k mo¿qsk vbso÷^),41 as if there it were a matter
of a time-honored expression designating, in contrast to the study of
nature, a sort of clearly defined theoretical activity.42
The quandary of the first publishers thus seems to be of a different
order than the one typically attributed to them; and if they gave proof
of initiative, this was less in inventing a new title than in refusing one
or those suggested by a tradition going back to Aristotle. Everything
encourages us to believe, then, that the title, On First Philosophy, did
not seem to them to apply adequately to the ensemble of writings,
united by a prior tradition, that they had before their eyes.
In fact, what does the expression “first philosophy” designate in
Aristotle’s own texts? The qualification “first,” whatever its meaning,
seems to come out of the concern with distinguishing several domains
within philosophy in general. To the question asked in book @—“Is
there one science of all the essences, or several” (Met. @.2, 997a15)?—
Aristotle clearly replies in book E: “There are as many parts to philoso-
phy as there are essences,” and he adds:
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It is thus necessary that there is, among these parts [jùoe] of phi-
losophy, a first philosophy and a second philosophy; it so happens,
in fact, that being and the one divide immediately in kinds, and
this is why sciences too will correspond to these different kinds; this
holds for the philosopher as it does for the one we call the mathe-
matician; for mathematics also correspond to parts: there is a first
science, a second science, and other more general sciences that fol-
low in this domain. (Met. E.2, 1004a2–9)
Thus, first philosophy is to philosophy in general what arithmetic is to

mathematics in general:43 as a part of a more general science, it bears
on a part of the object of this science, for, following a principle often
affirmed by Aristotle, to a different kind corresponds a different science
(see Met. E.2, 1003b19), and to a part of the kind corresponds a part of
science.
So where does the science of being qua being stand? In the beginning
of book E, it is precisely contrasted “to the sciences called particular”
(q¬k †k jùobf ibdljùksk): “for none of these sciences considers in gen-
eral being qua being, but parsing off some part [jùolt qf] of it, they
study its properties” (Met. E.1, 1003a22f.). Certain authors have
believed to find a contradiction between this text and the definition,
cited above, of philosophy in general, to the point where they believed it
necessary to eliminate this last passage as foreign to the doctrine of
book E.44 Yet there is a contradiction only if one claim’s to assimilate
first philosophy and the science of being qua being, for as such one has
a single science being defined in turn as universal science and as sci-
ence of a particular kind of being. In reality, if one stays close to
Aristotle’s text, the relation of the two terms is perfectly clear: far from
being confused with it, first philosophy appears as a part of the science
of being qua being.
This relation of part to whole is confirmed by the Aristotelian classi-
fication of theoretical sciences, where first philosophy, from there on
defined as “theology,” is juxtaposed, within philosophy in general, with
a second philosophy, which is “physics,” and with “mathematics” occu-
pying, it seems, not third place, but an intermediary position.45 To each
of these sciences is assigned a particular kind of being: to physics, that of
separate46 but mobile beings; to mathematics, that of immobile but non-
separate beings; to theology, finally, expressly assimilated to first philos-
ophy,47 the kind of separate and immobile beings. We call this science
theology, Aristotle specifies, because “it is not doubtful that, if the divine
is present somewhere, it is present in this [immobile and separate]
nature” (Met. C.1, 1026a20). And if theology is called first philosophy, it
is because “the most eminent [qfjfsqáqek] science must have as its
object the most eminent kind [qÌ qfjf¿q^qlk dùklt]; thus theoretical
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sciences have more value [^⁄obq¿qbo^f] than other sciences, and theol-
ogy has more value than other theoretical sciences” (Met. C.1, 1026a21).
Theology thus maintains a double relation of juxtaposition and preemi-
nence with the other sciences; it is the first term of a series, but it is
not—at least not any longer—the science of the series, so that the con-
trast remains with the science of being qua being. In the beginning of
book C, Aristotle contrasts once more, to a science that, admittedly,
remains unnamed, the sciences that, “concentrating their efforts on a
determined object, in a determined kind, deal with this object, and nei-
ther with being, taken absolutely, nor with being qua being” (Met. C.1,
1025b8). These sciences are unaware of their foundation, since, demon-
strating the attributes of an essence, but not this essence itself, they
must concede it from the start as a mere hypothesis. Set in the essence
of the divine, of which it presupposes existence, theology or first philos-
ophy does not seem to escape the condition of particular sciences;48 it
also seems subjected to the jurisdiction of a higher science that would
be to first philosophy what mathematics in general is to first mathe-
matics.
This interpretation of first philosophy as theology seems confirmed
by all the passages where Aristotle uses the expression cfilplc÷^
mo¿qe. Even where it is not expressly assimilated to theology, it is put
in contrast to physics understood as second49 philosophy (while the sci-
ence of being qua being is always defined in contrast, not to physics,
but to particular sciences as such). In the works on physics, first philos-
ophy is most often described as science of the form, while physics only
studies forms engaged in matter. But form in pure state, that is, “sepa-
rate” in the double sense of the word, only exists in the domain of
divine things, and it is the existence of such a domain that founds the
possibility of a philosophy other than the philosophy of nature. If the
divine did not exist, physics would be the whole of philosophy (cf. PA
I.1, 641a36), or at least it is physics that would deserve the name of
“first philosophy.”50 The struggle for primacy51 is thus between physics
and theology, while the science of being qua being does not seem to be
directly part of this debate. If essences separate from the sensible do
not exist, there is no possible theology, and the primacy passes to
physics. Yet we do not see how the science of being qua being, even if
its content cannot help but be affected by this, for all that ceases to
exist. To study “being qua being and not qua numbers, lines, or fire”
(Met. E.2, 1004b6)—this remains possible even outside the existence of
the divine. It is clear, on the contrary, that first philosophy presupposes
this existence. Thus the science of being qua being is not in league with
first philosophy. Not only does one access them by completely different
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paths, but further, once their object is defined, their fates remain inde-
pendent.
First philosophy is thus not the science of being qua being, and it is
theology. Effectively, in the two passages of the Aristotelian corpus
where the expression “first philosophy” seems to be employed by way of
reference, the reference can only verily apply to the properly theological
exposition of book J, where the essence of the prime mover is eluci-
dated. In the treatise On the Heavens, after having demonstrated the
uniqueness of the heavens with physical arguments, Aristotle adds that
the same result could be attained with “arguments drawn from first
philosophy” (afà q¬k †h q´t mo¿qet cfilplc÷^t iÏdsk) (DC I.8,
277b10). As Simplicius remarks ad loc., one in fact finds such a demon-
stration in book J of the Metaphysics (J.8, 1073a23f.), where the
uniqueness of the prime mover is deduced from the eternity of move-
ment. In the treatise Movement of Animals, after having recalled that
“all inorganic bodies are moved by some other body,” Aristotle adds:
“The way in which the first and eternal moved is moved, and how the
prime mover moves it, has been determined previously in our writings
on first philosophy” (†k q¬k mbo◊ q´t mo¿qet cfilplc÷^t) (MA 6,
700b7). This reference appears in the same book J (chapter 8) where
Aristotle shows that the relation of the prime mover to the first moved
is that of the desirable to the desiring. It thus cannot be doubted that
by the expression “first philosophy” Aristotle wanted to designate the
study of first beings, more precisely of the prime mover: in other words,
theology.
Such is at least the most frequent use of the expression in the writ-
ings of the corpus aristotelicum. One single exception must be made for
book I of the Metaphysics. On three occasions, the expression
cfilplc÷^ mo¿qe or equivalent expressions (≠ molhbfjùke cfilplc÷^, ≠
mo¿qe †mfpq©je) are employed to designate the science of being qua
being. Here again, it is a matter of opposing primordial science to those
secondary sciences of mathematics and physics; but that which distin-
guishes them is no longer the delimitation of their respective domains
within the universal field of being. Physics and mathematics are cer-
tainly considered parts of philosophy (jùoe q´t plc÷^t) (Met. I.4,
1061b33), but first philosophy, far from itself also being a part, even a
primordial part, of philosophy, seems to merge with philosophy as a
whole. Thus, while “physics considers the accidents and the principles
of beings, qua moved and not qua beings,” the first science studies
these same subjects “qua beings, and not under any other relation”
(h^v~ Úplk Òkq^ qà Âmlhb÷jbká †pqfk, äii~ l‰u æ £qboÏk qf) (Met. I.4,
1061b28). Likewise, it belongs to this science to study the principles of
mathematics in as much as they are common (Met. I.4, 1061b19).
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Finally, it is for first philosophy to examine aporias on the existence of

mathematical beings. For such an examination comes neither from
mathematics, which, as with all particular sciences, must presuppose
the existence of its object, nor from physics, which knows no other
beings than “those which have in themselves the principle of movement
or of rest,” nor from the “science which pertains to demonstration,”
because it does not consider the very matter of the demonstration (Met.
I.1, 1059b14–21). As we will see, the double role of the establishment
of principles common to all the sciences and the justification of each
science through the elucidation of the existential status proper to its
object will be assigned by Aristotle to the science of being qua being.
That this role should belong here to first philosophy reveals a concep-
tion little in keeping with the usual meaning of this expression.
The unusual character of the terminology of book I leads one to pose
again the question of its authenticity. This authenticity was contested
in the nineteenth century, notably by Spengel and Christ, because of
stylistic peculiarities.52 The unconventional assimilation of philosophy
in general to first philosophy and of the latter to the science of being
qua being, even if it had hardly drawn the attention of the commenta-
tors, poses a problem, which, in the hypothesis of authenticity, would
remain unresolved. We have long now remarked that chapters 1–8 of
book I take up the questions laid out in books @, E, and C. Yet we have
seen that, if the expression “first philosophy” is not found in the first of
these three books, it is constantly applied to theology in the other two.
How can one explain, on this major point, that book I is in absolute
discord with writings of which it would be only a summary or a rough
draft?53 Wouldn’t it rather be fitting to attribute the designation of the
science of being qua being as “first philosophy” to an inept disciple, who
would have hastily interpreted certain texts, which are actually quite
subtle, of book C, where the two sciences, while distinguished from each
other, are presented as concurrent?54 We will note, furthermore, that
chapter 7 of book I, which takes up the classifications of the theoretical
sciences of book C, no longer employs the expression “first philosophy” to
designate theology. A few lines above, after having defined first philoso-
phy as the science of being qua being, it was difficult for the supposed
author to assimilate it to a science of a determined kind of being, this
being having been the divine. And yet it seems that this same author
finds a solution in a way by furtively assimilating being qua being with
separate being, that is, divine being: “Since a science of being qua being
and qua separate [ql„ Òkqlt æ Ûk h^◊ usofpqÏk] exists, we should
examine whether one must allow that this science is the same as
physics or whether it is not rather different.”55 This assimilation of
being qua being and separate being would become traditional among
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the commentators, and, by allowing the identification of the science of

being qua being with first philosophy, would authorize a unitary inter-
pretation of the Metaphysics, which has perpetuated itself up until
today. The good fortune of this interpretation should not however make
us forget that it rests on one single text of the corpus aristotelicum,
which is reconciled with difficulty to the greater part of Aristotelian
analyses, and of which the very uniqueness seems to us supplementary
proof of the inauthenticity of the context.56
Even in allowing that book I was already associated with the other
books when the publishers decided to give one title to the whole,57 in
their eyes it could only have confirmed the use of the expression “first
philosophy” in the sense of theology. In fact, first philosophy was
defined there as the science of being qua being only insofar as being
qua being was understood as “separate” being, that is, as divine being.
The publishers thus found themselves in the presence of a title—that of
First Philosophy—to which Aristotle’s very texts (or those known under
his name) attributed a univocal meaning, and of an ensemble of writ-
ings to which this title should normally have fit. Yet what did they find
in them? Analyses that, for the most part, had not to do with divine
being, immobile and separate, but with being in the movement of the
sublunar world: in book ?, a historical exposition on the discovery of
the causes of being that are subject to change and consisting of matter;
in book ^, a demonstration of the impossibility of tracing back to infin-
ity in the series of causes; in book @, a collection of aporias, the majority
of which concern the relation of beings and corruptible principles to
beings and incorruptible principles; in book E, a dialectical justification
of the principle of contradiction, understood as a principle common to all
the sciences; in book B, a dictionary of philosophical terms, the majority
of which mostly relate to physics; in book C, a classification of the sci-
ences and a distinction of the different meanings of being; in books X and
F, an investigation on the unity of the essence of sensible beings; in book
W, an elucidation of the concepts of act and of power, essentially in their
relation to movement; in book G, an analysis of the notion of unity; in
book I, a summary of books @, E, C, and in the second part, a compila-
tion of the Physics; in the first part of book J (chapters 1–5), a new
investigation on the different species of essences and on the principles
common to all beings; finally, in books K and L, a critical examination
principally devoted to the Platonic theory of numbers. With the excep-
tion of a few allusions to theology—mostly programmatic, in the begin-
ning of book ?, and, in books C and I, the mention that is made of it
concerning the classification of the sciences58—in all of the Metaphysics,
there is thus only the second part of book J that is devoted to theologi-
cal questions, under the form of a clarification of the essence of the
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prime mover (of which the necessity is demonstrated in more depth in

book VIII of the Physics). Effectively, it is to these developments in
book J that Aristotle’s references to First Philosophy allude. But now
we understand why the publishers, whichever ones, abandoned extend-
ing this title across the whole of the writings that were transmitted to
them by the tradition. If first philosophy is theology (and such was cer-
tainly Aristotle’s thought), how can one attribute to first philosophy an
investigation that essentially concerns the constitution of sensible
beings? Will we say that such an investigation stems, if not from first
philosophy, at least from the science of being qua being? Yet we have
seen, according to an interpretation of which the author of book I
would be the first witness, that being qua being was very early on
assimilated to separate being and ontology to theology.59
By their rejection of the title first philosophy, the publishers recog-
nized the absence of theological preoccupations in the major part of the
“metaphysical” writings. Yet, unable to conceive of a philosophical sci-
ence that, distinct from physics (and from mathematics) as from logic
and morality, was not as a result a theology, incapable of recognizing
the originality and the specificity of a science of being qua being, they
found themselves in the presence of an investigation that figured nei-
ther in the traditional divisions of philosophy (logic, physics, morality),
nor even in the Aristotelian frameworks of knowledge (mathematics,
physics, theology). This science without name and without place, in
which they did not recognize theology, yet which they could not admit
as other than theological, they made for centuries metaphysics. Kbqà
qà crpfhá: first of all, this title had, without a doubt, a descriptive
value. It revealed the post-physics character of an investigation that,
not only in the analyses of books X, F, and W on sensible being, but also
in the properly theological passages of book J, extended the physical
investigation of principles to a higher level of abstraction. Yet at the
same time, through an ambiguity doubtless unconscious, this title pre-
served the theological interpretation of the science of being qua being.
The post-physics investigation was at the same time a science of trans-
physics. A science of the divine or an investigation that, by laborious
paths of human knowledge, tries to rise all the way up to being qua
being, metaphysics could be one and the other at once, while the
expression “first philosophy” would have difficulty applying to the sec-
ond of these aspects.
Yet, in giving two different series of interpretations to the “meta” in
“metaphysics,”60 the commentators recover the duality that this title
intended to conceal: some insist on the transcendence of the object,
while others insist on the posteriority of the investigation. At first
sight, these two interpretations are not contradictory, and the ingenu-
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ity of the commentators would apply itself to demonstrating their com-

patibility. However, in the following chapter we will see that, if the
transcendent object is understood as principle, that is, as a point of
departure of knowledge, one would very well have to choose between
these two interpretations. For now, the unitary perspective, according
to which there is only one science in the Metaphysics—that which
Aristotle “investigates”61—or at least one single conception of this sci-
ence, leads to the following situation: if the “science being investigated”
is theology, it has a name and a place in the edifice of knowledge, but it
is absent from the majority of writings called “metaphysics”; if the sci-
ence investigated is not theology, the non-theological character of these
writings is explained, but such a science remains unnamed and must
win its justification and its place in the field of philosophy. On the one
hand, we have a science that is familiar but which we cannot locate; on
the other, we have a science without name and without status, but that
presents itself beneath a real investigation. The commentators chose to
give a name to an unattainable science. Would it not be more faithful to
Aristotle’s approach to conserve the precariousness and uncertainty of
the “science being investigated” revealed by its original anonymity?
2. First Philosophy or Metaphysics?
In all things, it is, as is said, the point of departure

that is the main thing, and that, for this reason,
is also the most difficult.
(Soph. El. 34, 183b22.)
2.1
To the question, “Why does first philosophy come after physics in the
order of knowledge?” we have seen that the majority of commentators
responded with the Aristotelian distinction of priority in itself and of
priority for us.62 But does this explanation go back to the Stagirite him-
self? And, first of all, did he himself recognize the necessarily post-
physics character of his first philosophy?
In fact, what Aristotle insists on is the priority of first philosophy in
relation to the secondary sciences, mathematics and especially physics:
If there is something eternal, immobile, and separate, it is obvi-
ously a theoretical science that has knowledge of it: a science that is
most certainly not physics (for physics has for its object certain
beings in movement), nor mathematics, but a science prior to both
[äiià molqùo^t äjclÿk].63
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In what does this priority of first philosophy consist? The expres-

sions moÏqbolt and Ápqbolt are among those terms of which book B of
the Metaphysics studies the different significations. Aristotle distin-
guishes three meanings (Met. B.11, 1018b9f.). First, priority designates
a position defined in relation to a fixed point called “first” (mo¬qlk) or
“principle” (äou©). In general, that which is closer to the principle is
called “prior” and that which is farther is called “posterior.” The rela-
tion of priority thus presupposes, in this case, the preliminary choice of
a principle, a choice that can be suggested by nature (c·pbf) or arbitrar-
ily (moÌt qÌ qruÏk). The second sort of priority is priority according to
knowledge (qÌ q∂ dk¿pbf moÏqbolk), which is also designated as prior-
ity “taken absolutely” (ãmi¬t moÏqbolk). It subdivides, admittedly,
according to whether one takes as a criterion the discourse (h^qà qÌk
iÏdlk) or the sensation (h^qà q™k ^¤pvepfk). In the first case, it is the
universal which is prior; in the second, the individual. Finally, the third
sort of priority is priority according to nature or essence (h^qà c·pfk h^◊
l‰p÷^k). In this sense, “all things which can exist independently of
other things, while the other things cannot exist without them, a dis-
tinction already used by Plato,” are called prior.64 That, Aristotle adds,
is the fundamental meaning of priority, since all other meanings can be
traced back to it (Met. B.11, 1019a12). The exposition of book B omits,
admittedly, a fourth meaning, which had been indicated by the parallel
(and probably earlier) exposition of the Categories: where “prior” desig-
nates “the best and the most worthy.” “In informal language, it is said
of men that we esteem the most and that we like the best, that they
come before the others.” But “that is,” Aristotle adds, “the most indirect
of all the meanings of prior” (Cat. 12, 14b7). One could, finally, be sur-
prised not to encounter chronological priority in this enumeration: in
the exposition of the Categories it was presented as “the first and fun-
damental meaning”; in that of book B of the Metaphysics it only
appears as a particular case of priority according to position.
To what extent do these different meanings apply to first philoso-
phy? Priority according to position is of little interest here, for every-
thing depends on the choice and the definition of the point of reference:
if the choice is arbitrary, anything can successively be called prior and
posterior; if the choice is in keeping with nature, priority according to
position becomes confused with priority according to essence and
nature. The following, on the other hand, agrees perfectly with first
philosophy, which is the science of the first being according to essence
and nature, that is, of the being that, itself having need of nothing else
in order to exist, is that without which nothing else could be; this privi-
leged being is essence, understood at once as subject and as substrate
(Âmlhb÷jbklk).65 Yet, we will see that first philosophy, first defined as
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the science of separate and divine being, will in fact become the science
of the category of being that best imitates divine being: that is to say,
essence. As for “the most indirect” meaning of priority, the one that
designates by metaphor an order of value, without question it applies
to first philosophy, which is “the most excellent” (qfjfsqáqe) of the sci-
ences (Met. C.1, 1026a21). There remains priority according to knowl-
edge: nowhere does Aristotle specify that it does not also belong to first
philosophy, and, as the meaning of the expression when it is employed
absolutely (ãmi¬t) is found in first philosophy, there is no doubt that
first philosophy is, for Aristotle, prior to physics just as much in the
order of knowledge as in that of dignity or, further, “according to nature
and essence.”
It is thus for each meaning that priority applies to first philosophy,
and it is not clear that Aristotle took pains to specify that, because it is
first in one or several meanings, it could not be first in others.
Furthermore, all these meanings trace back to the one that the
Categories said was “first and fundamental” and that book B only
seems to omit because it goes without saying as soon as one speaks of
before and after: chronological priority. Thus, what could be the order of
knowledge, if not a relation of succession? The prior according to dis-
course is that in which discourse finds its most sure point of departure
for its procedure: the universal. The prior according to sensation is that
which sensation encounters from the start, which is the individual.
Admittedly, Aristotle repeatedly contrasts chronological priority
(uoÏkø) and logical priority (iÏdø): thus the acute angle is chronologi-
cally prior to the right angle, since it is generated before it, but it is log-
ically posterior to it, since the definition of the acute angle presupposes
that of the right angle (Met. K.8, 1084b2–19). But what does this mean,
if not that one defines the right angle before defining the acute angle,
while one constructs the acute angle before constructing the right
angle? Thus, logical priority is also only a temporal priority, except that
the time of logical definition is not that of geometrical construction. If
only the latter is called uoÏklt by Aristotle, it is because the genesis of
things, more generally the movement of the universe, is that according
to which time is defined, since it is its measure (cf. Phys. IV.11, 219b1).
The time of human discourse may well endeavor to come before that of
genesis: it still remains that it is in relation to the latter that the for-
mer is given as the inverse, and furthermore, this inversion itself
unfolds in a time that is none other than that of things. Likewise, when
Aristotle affirms that “that which is last in the order of analysis is first
in the order of genesis” (NE III.5, 1112b23) he means that the theoreti-
cal and practical investigation of the human66 recommences, but in the
inverse sense, the spontaneous unwinding of the hÏpjlt: nevertheless,
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this turning back is recognized and measured in a time that is the

number of natural movement. One thus does not escape time through
knowledge; or, rather, one only escapes it in a certain way in time.
As for priority “according to nature and essence,” it is nothing other
than the order of causality, which presupposes, at least schematically,
succession in time. Admittedly, once again, all will depend on the mode
of consideration: if one considers efficient or material causality, “essen-
tial” time will coincide with the time of generation; it would still be the
same, in a way, if one considers formal causality: logical priority of the
subject to the attributes coincides with causal priority of the essence to
its properties and of the substrate to its determinations.67 Yet, for one
who considers final causality, the time of essence and nature will be the
inverse of the time of genesis: “The posterior according to generation is
prior according to nature” (Met. ?.8, 989a15) or, further, “according to
essence” (Met. K.2, 1077a26), which is to say that the perfect is prior to
the imperfect in the order of essence and nature, but is posterior to it in
the order of generation. This is a principle that above all is pronounced
and applied where consideration of the final cause predominates, that
is, in the biological works.68 In this last case, essential priority is none
other than that of discourse, that is, of the definition:
Chronologically, it is matter and generation which are necessarily
prior; but logically [qÕ iÏdø], it is the essence and form of each
thing; this becomes evident if one pronounces the definition [qÌk
iÏdlk] of generation. Thus the definition of the construction of the
house does not presuppose that of the construction.69
What is there to say, if not that one defines the house before defining
the construction, while one must build the house before seeing its com-
pletion?
From whichever way one approaches the question, priority appears
dependent on the mode of consideration, that is, upon knowledge. The
primacy of essence itself is only the primacy of the consideration of
essence: this priority is not arbitrary, but expresses the obligation that
the discourse is under to begin with essence if it wants to know of what
it speaks. It is in this sense that Aristotle frequently assimilates essen-
tial priority to priority according to discourse (iÏdø), a particular case
of priority according to knowledge. Yet the order of knowledge, a
human action which unfolds in time, is itself a chronological order. If
the two orders are at times opposed, it is because human knowledge
can, and perhaps must, trace back the natural order of things, which is
that in relation to which the time of the physicist, or, what here
amounts to the same, the philosopher, is defined. One could very well
wish to empty time of the notion of priority and reduce the latter to a
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purely “logical” or intelligible order, but one would not escape the
necessity for the human mind to unfold the terms of a succession in
time. Furthermore, there is no order that is not temporal, there is no
first or second that is not first or second in time, since, for Aristotle,
time is none other than ordinal time itself: “The number of movement
in relation to the prior and the posterior” (Phys. IV.11, 219b1). Time is
that by which there is a before and an after. And even if knowledge
inverses the before and the after of things, it is still in time, which is
the number of natural movement, that this inversion takes place.
2.2
If it is true that primacy according to essence goes back to a certain

order of knowledge, and if this order itself can only unfold in time, it is
clear that all meanings of priority apply without contradiction to first
philosophy. Incontestably first in value as in order of essence, it is for
that no less chronologically prior to sciences called second sciences, and
nothing indicates that Aristotle would have wanted to exclude this
meaning that he himself called “first and fundamental” (Cat. 12, 14a26).
Descartes was less unfaithful to a certain Aristotelian thinking than he
believed when, in the preface to the Principles, he thought he had
reversed the traditional order of knowledge in making metaphysics the
root of the philosophical tree, that is, the absolute beginning of knowl-
edge, from which derive, according to a relation of deduction at once log-
ical and temporal, physics and applied sciences.70 For metaphysics, the
science of “principles” and “first causes,” to be chronologically first, two
conditions are needed, which Descartes would thus pronounce:
First, [these principles] must be so clear and so evident that the
human mind cannot doubt their truth when it attentively concen-
trates on them; and, secondly, the knowledge of other things must
depend on them, in the sense that the principles must be capable of
being known without knowledge of these other matters, but not vice
versa.71
The second of these conditions only makes explicit the notion of principle
itself and coincides perfectly with the Aristotelian definition of priority
according to knowledge.72 But if the principle is that upon which knowl-
edge of other things depends and if this relation is not reciprocal, on
what would knowledge of the principle depend? Descartes—and this is
to what the first condition answers—would resolve the difficulty with
the theory of evidence, which institutes a relation of immediacy
between human knowledge and the clarity of first truths. Thus, episte-
mological primacy can coincide with ontological primacy and the philos-
ophy of principles can at the same time be the principle of philosophy.
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It does not seem that Aristotle posed the question otherwise, nor
that, at least in his first writings, he resolved it in a much different
way. In the Protrepticus, he develops at length the thesis of the easiness
of philosophy. The proof that “the acquisition of wisdom is easier than
that of other goods” is first given through the consideration of its his-
tory: Although humans may well have devoted themselves to other
branches of knowledge, the fact remains that in little time their progress
in philosophy surpassed the progress they were able to make in other
sciences.73 In another argument: “the fact that all men like living in
[philosophy] [qÌ mákq^t cfilusobÿk ^‰q∂]74 and wish to devote them-
selves to it after having taken leave of all their other worries.” Yet this
is only the confirmation, historical and psychological, of an optimism
founded on the very nature of philosophy and its object: “The prior is
always better known than the posterior [äb◊ dào dksofj¿qbo^ qà
moÏqbo^ q¬k Âpqùosk] and the best according to nature is better
known than the worst; for science prefers defined and ordered things
and it prefers causes over effects.”75 Thus we already see coinciding, in
their application to the object of philosophy, the multiple significations of
priority that Aristotle would recognize later on: according to time,
according to essence, in the order of knowledge, and also in the hierarchy
of values. It is important to note that at the beginning of his philosophi-
cal career, Aristotle believes the principle to be more knowable than
that of which it is the principle, the cause more immediately accessible
than the effect, and, a corollary that Descartes would not deny, the soul
easier to know than the body:
If the soul is better than the body [and it is, for the former is more
in the nature of the principle than the latter (äoufh¿qbolk dào q™k
c·pfk †pqfk)], and there are arts and sciences concerning the body,
such as medicine and gymnastics . . . , reason holds that there
would exist an investigation and an art concerning the soul and the
virtues of the soul, and we would be able to acquire them, since we
can do so with objects that contain more ignorance and are more
difficult to know [h^◊ q¬k jbq~ ädkl÷^t mib÷lklt h^◊ dk¬k^f
uîbmsqùosk].76
If thus there are objects that contain ignorance, there are others that
contain knowledge, in this double sense that they are sources of knowl-
edge77 and that it is in their nature to be known immediately. In order
for philosophy of first things to be, at the same time, first in the order
of knowledge, Aristotle is forced to transpose in the things a sort of
knowledge in itself, an objective knowledge, which assures perfect coin-
cidence of the ratio cognoscendi and the ratio essendi. The most impor-
tant is at the same time the most knowable, the most useful is at the
same time the easiest. The apparently optimistic thesis of the easiness
of philosophy only reveals the minimum exigency proper to all philoso-
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phy: If philosophy is the science of first principles, and if first principles

constitute that by which everything exists and that by which every-
thing is known, first principles simply must be known immediately, if
other things are to be such. The philosopher who reflects on the essence
of philosophy does not have the choice: either philosophy is easy, or it is
impossible; either philosophy is first, in time as in importance, or it
does not exist.
This thesis is so far from isolated in Aristotle’s œuvre that it inspires
the entire conception of knowledge implied in the Posterior Analytics,
which appears right from the first line of this treatise: “All teaching
given or received by the path of reasoning comes from pre-existing
knowledge” (Post. An. I.1, 71a1). Here we recognize—and Aristotle him-
self reminds us of it (Post. An. I.1, 71a29)—the aporia that Meno put to
Socrates: we can learn neither what we know, for we already know it,
nor what we do not know, since we then do not know which thing must
be learned. In responding to this argument—and we wonder whether it
was really so “captious” (Meno, 81D)—with the theory of recollection,
which is only the mythological transposition of it, Socrates in fact gave
justification to Meno. Since it is the beginning of knowledge that is dif-
ficult, one would allow that knowledge never began, but that it was
already there in its totality:
Since the soul is immortal and has lived many lives, and since it
has seen all that goes on here and in Hades, there is nothing that it
has not learned. . . . Since everything is in nature and the soul has
learned everything, nothing is stopping it, when it is recalling one
thing, which men call learning, from finding on its own all the oth-
ers. (Meno, 81C–D)
In order to resolve the difficulties raised by the order of knowledge,

Plato denied that knowledge had an order other than circular: knowl-
edge is immediately total or it does not exist.
Aristotle could not be satisfied with this answer. If all science is
learned by way of prior knowledge, it is hard to see what could be prior to
this total science, this “science of all things,”78 and, consequently, how it
could be acquired, even if in a prior life. Would we say—and it is certainly
thus, it seems, that the Platonic myth should be understood—that the
science of all things is somehow for us “connatural” (p·jcrqlt) (Met.
?.9, 993a1)? Yet this innateness is thus only latent and “it would be
surprising if we possessed in ourselves, unbeknownst to us, the highest
of the sciences [q™k ho^q÷pqek q¬k †mfpqej¬k]” (Met. ?.9, 993a1–2).
This passage from the Metaphysics, which manifestly takes aim at
the theory of recollection, is illuminated by a text of the Posterior
Analytics, where Aristotle critiques a theory according to which our dis-
position (£gft) to know principles would not be acquired, but innate, and
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first of all, latent (i^kvákbfk): “That is,” Aristotle says, “an absurdity,
since what results is that, although having knowledge more exact than
demonstration, we do not cease being ignorant” (Post. An. II.19, 99b27).
In other words, how could the principle, which is that by which all the
rest is known, itself be confusedly known? How could that which sheds
light on all the rest itself be obscure? Here we recognize the idea of a
cognizability in itself, tied to the very essence of the principle, appar-
ently laid out a priori outside of all reference to human knowledge.
That which, in Descartes, would have been experienced through the
mode of evidence, first appears, in Aristotle, as a logical exigency: prin-
ciples must be clear and distinct, if they are to be principles. The sci-
ence of principles must be the most known, that is, first in the order of
knowledge, if it is to be the science of principles.
Aristotle’s first philosophy is thus “prior” for the same reason that
had driven Plato to cast knowledge of first truths into a “prior” life. Yet
Aristotle is not satisfied with a mythical priority. Real knowledge
unfolds for him according to an order that is not only logical, but also
chronological: no demonstration is possible if it does not presuppose the
truth of its premises. It is proper to syllogism to depend on an
antecedent truth, and it is much more in this kind of precedence of
truth itself than in the reproach of a vicious circle, made later by the
skeptics, that Aristotle situates the inevitable imperfection of this rea-
soning. But then, if the demonstration is that which has always already
begun, there could be no possible demonstration of beginnings: the
premises of the first syllogism would be “first and indemonstrable”
(Post. An. I.2, 71b26). Aristotle insists on the paradoxical, and also the
inevitable, in this exigency: the premises are first even though they are
indemonstrable; but they are also first because they are indemonstra-
ble, “for otherwise we could not know them in the absence of demon-
stration” (Post. An. I.1, 71b27). And Aristotle specifies in what way this
primacy of premises must be understood:
They must be causes of the conclusion, a being better known than
they, and prior to it: they must be causes since we only have the
science of a thing at the moment when we have known its cause;
they must be prior since they are causes; they are also prior from
the point of view of knowledge. (Post. An. I.1, 71b29)
The priority of premises would thus be at once logical, chronological,

and epistemological: at least these three orders must coincide, if demon-
stration, and thus science, is to be possible. Here we are far from this
“reversal between the order of knowledge and the order of being,” in
which Brunschvicg would see the fundamental postulate of Aristotelian
realism.79 The idea of knowledge implies on the contrary that its order
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be the very order of being, that the ontologically first be also epistemo-
logically prior. If nature seems to “syllogize,” it is because syllogism
only reveals the mode of the production of things. The entire theory of
demonstration and science in the Analytics presupposes this coinci-
dence between the movement by which knowledge progresses and the
one by which things are engendered.80
It would thus not be surprising that the question of beginning is
posed in analogous terms where knowledge and movement are con-
cerned. In both cases, the impossibility of a regression to infinity
results in the positing of an absolutely first term. On the one hand,
there is a non-caused cause, which is the unmoved prime mover; on the
other, there is a non-deduced premise, which is the undemonstrated
principle of demonstration.81 But then how is the principle appre-
hended? If, being the basis of all knowledge, it must be better known
than that which it makes possible to know, and if, however, it is not an
object of science, since all science demonstrates from already known
principles, it would be well to allow for a mode of knowledge distinct
from science and superior to it: “If outside of science we possess no
other sort of knowledge, the fact remains that [ib÷mbq^f] intuition will
be the beginning of science” (Post. An. II.19, 100b13).
It is perhaps not by chance that the question of beginning is posed in
the last chapter of Posterior Analytics and that it is resolved with a
regressive step. Here we sense that the order of the actual investigation is
not that of ideal knowledge and that it is not with syllogisms that a the-
ory of syllogism is made. Aristotle described knowledge as a deduction;
but all deduction is deduction from something, which, finally, is not
deduced. If all knowledge were deductive, would one have to allow that
knowledge finds its origin in non-knowledge and thus destroys itself? One
would only escape from this consequence in allowing a mode of knowledge
superior to science itself, which is intuition. There is no other way out,
which Aristotle expresses twice by the verb ib÷mbq^f: “Nevertheless,” he
writes again in the Nicomachean Ethics, “it is intuition that apprehends
principles.”82 Here we are far from the conquering approach of a
Descartes, installing itself immediately in the evidence of simple natures
in order to deduce the infinite truths that follow from it. At the end of his
regressive analysis of the conditions of knowledge, Aristotle negatively
outlines the idea of intuition, rather than brings us the experience of it.
Intuition is only the cognitive correlate of the principle, its mode of
being known: it is that without which the principle cannot be known, if
at least it is knowable. Yet nothing tells us that it is in fact knowable.
Nothing tells us either that first philosophy is humanly possible. In
the second chapter of book ? of the Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the
conditions of this science, called wisdom, which deals with first causes
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and first principles. One of its characteristics is exactness, which is just

another name for the clarity of its object.83 Therefore, to affirm that “the
most exact sciences are those that are the most a science of principles”
(Met. ?.2, 982a25) comes down to recalling that principles and causes
are “the most knowable things there are” (jáifpq^ †mfpqeqá) (Met. ?.2,
982b2). Wisdom, the science of the most knowable, should thus be, of
all sciences, the most easily accessible. In fact, it is nothing of the sort,
and, without explaining this apparent contradiction, a few lines above
Aristotle defines the wise as “the one who is capable of knowing things
that are difficult and uneasy for man to know [qà uîbmà . . . h^◊ j™
<íaf^ äkvo¿mø dfdk¿phbfk]” (Met. ?.2, 982a10). If one recalls that in
the Protrepticus the acquisition of knowledge, in comparison with that
of other goods, was presented as by far the easiest (mliiÕ <ápqe),84
one could not fail to wonder at the reasons for this reversal of the for
and the against that makes the end of the progression of the most
accessible science the most laborious. Actually, in the same chapter of
book ?, Aristotle furnishes us with an indirect response: wisdom, he
says, is the most free of the sciences, that is, the only one which is its
own end. Yet “the nature of man is in so many respects enslaved” that
“one could rightly deem the possession of wisdom inhuman [l‰h
äkvosm÷ke]” and that, according to the word of Simonides, “Only God
could have this privilege” (Met. ?.2, 982b28–30). If it is true, as the
poets say, that “divinity is naturally jealous,” there would be no better
occasion for its jealousy to be manifest than in regards to philosophy.
This science is in fact divine in a double sense: the science of divine
things, but also “the most worthy science for God to possess,” or at
least, Aristotle specifies, the science that “it would be of principal con-
cern for God to possess” (Met. ?.2, 983a6–9). Of course, Aristotle casts
the hypothesis of the jealous gods into the universe of poetic fiction.85
Nonetheless, he considers for a moment that it is “undignified of man
to not connect himself with investigating the kind of science that is
appropriate to him [q™k h^v~ ^ÂqÌk †mfpq©jek]” (Met. ?.2, 982b31).
Likewise, at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, after having described
what would be a perfectly contemplative life, Aristotle asks whether
“such a life is not beyond the human condition [hob÷qqsk ∞ h^q~
åkvosmlk]” and he responds that, if a human being leads that life,
they would live it “not as human, but insofar as there is something
divine in them” (NE X.7, 1177b26f.). Of this “divine in the human,” we
would not be surprised to find that “principle of the principle” that the
Posterior Analytics (II.19, 100b15) considered superior to human sci-
ence: “If intuition [kl„t] is that which is divine in relation to man, the
life in keeping with intuition would be a divine life in relation to
human life” (NE X.7, 1177b30).
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These passages of the Nicomachean Ethics are generally given an

optimistic interpretation: man would be a being capable of rising above
his condition and of participating in the divine. Yet we could just as well
draw from this conclusion that the contemplative life is not a properly
human life and that the human qua human is lacking in intellectual
intuition. Of course, a bit further on Aristotle presents contemplative
life as the most proper to man, “if it is actually in this that humanity is
most manifest [b¤mbo ql„ql jáifpq^ åkvosmlt]” (NE X.7, 1178a7). Yet
the contradiction, pointed out in particular by Rodier,86 between these
two series of passages is perhaps only ostensible: the essence of man is
other than his condition, and intuition, of which we have an idea, of
which we discern the function as the condition for the possibility of wis-
dom, and in which we situate, by a sort of passage to the limit, the
maximum (jáifpq^) essence of man, is perhaps refused to us in fact.
These texts from the Nicomachean Ethics would thus signify that the
limitations of the human, in particular of his faculties of knowledge,
are less negations than privations, that human in fact appeals to
human de jure, and that the truth of the phenomenal human is to be
investigated, not in its actual condition, but in the essence of the
human in itself, which is strangely similar to the divine. Thus the jeal-
ousy of the gods would be justified, and one would then have to under-
stand the pretension, expressed in book ? of the Metaphysics, of shar-
ing the possession of wisdom with divinity as defiance.87
Wisdom, easy de jure, and soon designated as first philosophy, is
thus of all the sciences the most difficult in fact. Or rather, there is a
more than human wisdom, which is theoretically easy, since its object
is, of all things, the most clear and the most exact, and a human philos-
ophy, too human, which, first functioning on the level of things proper
to us [de chez nous], cannot maintain with first principles that immedi-
ate relation of evidence that Aristotle designates under the name of
kl„t. This imbalance, this distance recognized between a knowledge in
itself and a knowledge for us, was not new: the old Parmenides already
objected to it to Socrates in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name. Are
not the ideas, which the Cratylus had long before laid out as conditions
for the possibility of knowledge (Cratylus, 439C–440B), thus as the
realities the most knowable in themselves, in fact the least knowable
for us, not to say completely unknowable? If science is a relation and if
the correlative terms are necessarily homogenous, there would no more
be a science for us of things in themselves than the slave within us [de
chez nous] is the slave of the self-mastery (Parmenides, 133C–D). Yet,
just as the human only maintains a relation with the human and the
ideas with the ideas, the idea of science would be the science of truth in
itself, and our [de chez nous] science (mô~ ≠jÿk) would be the science of
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our [de chez nous] truth (Parmenides, 134A). From this analysis, the
old Parmenides drew the paradoxical conclusion that God is powerless
in knowing what is proper to us [de chez nous] (Parmenides, 134D–E).
Aristotle would cheerfully take a stand on this apparent powerlessness:
it is in the nature of divine intelligence to know that which is most
divine, and knowledge of things proper to us [de chez nous] would for it
only be a change for the worse (Met. J.9, 1074b25f.). Aristotle would be
sensitive, on the other hand, to the inverse aspect of the paradox: how
could the most exact science (q™k ähof_bpqáqek †mfpq©jek) (Parmenides,
134C), that is, the science of that which is most manifest (c^kboÏk)
(Top. II.4, 111a8), be that which is most hidden from us? How could the
most knowable in itself be the least knowable for us?88
To this aporia, certain Platonic texts could provide a partial response.
The light of the sun may well be that by which all vision is made possi-
ble (Rep. VI, 509B), but first it produces the inverse effect by blinding
the one who comes out of the darkness (Rep. VII, 515D–516A). Between
the marvelous clarity of intelligible truths and their apprehension by
the human eye, this temporary failure would thus interpose itself, pre-
venting sight from recognizing its true object. Aristotle would take up
this explanation in a text of book ^, which seems to us evidence of
another Platonic phase of his thought.89 Lessening some of the opti-
mism he professed in the Protrepticus, in this passage he recognizes
that “the consideration of truth is, in one sense, difficult, and in
another sense, easy” (Met. ^.1, 993a30). Of this duality of aspects, he
first gives an explanation, founded on the nature of error, which does
not interest us here.90 But he provides another, which consists in distin-
guishing two kinds of difficulties: there is that of which the cause is in
the things (†k qlÿt moádj^pfk) and that of which the cause is in us (†k
≠jÿk). The difficulty of philosophy would be of this latter sort: it is “not
in the obscurity of its object, but in the weakness of the human eye.
Just as, in fact, the eyes of bats are blinded by the light of day, so it is
with the intuition of our soul regarding things most evident by nature
[qà q∂ c·pbf c^kbo¿q^q^ mákqsk].”91 The metaphor of blindness here
serves to dissipate a paradox that is at bottom only apparent. The most
evident still remains the most knowable, even for us, and this is why
philosophy is easy. Yet one must take into account contingent and tran-
sient circumstances that make philosophy seem difficult. The distinc-
tion between the obstacle that is in the things and the obstacle that is
in us thus comes down here to opposing the real to the apparent, the
definitive to the provisionary, the inevitable to that which depends on
us.
Platonic pedagogy had for its goal to habituate the eye to the con-
templation of light (Rep. VII, 516A–B): Was this not to situate at the
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end of a process a knowledge that should be logically first?92 Yet Plato

did not take tragically this imbalance between the ideal order of true
knowledge, which goes from the ideal to the sensible, and the human
order of an investigation that rises from the sensible to the idea. In
fact, on the one hand, this investigation was only a propaedeutic to
knowledge, and a glimpse of its end allowed the hope for an approach
that finally descended, that would coincide with the very genesis of
things. On the other hand, this very propaedeutic, at all of its moments,
was only a rediscovery of a recollection of knowledge that was logically
and chronologically prior. The most simple and the most luminous were
thus, despite appearances, the most known and, in a certain way, the
already known.
Aristotle would retain the Platonic ideal of a descending knowledge,
which goes from the simple to the complex, the clear to the confused,
the universal to the particular, and the Analytics would establish the
definitive canon of such a knowledge. Yet we have seen that this knowl-
edge, which is always mediated, is suspended from immediate intuition
from the beginning, in such a way that the conquest of this point of
departure would be the preliminary task of all human knowledge. Let
us suppose, then, that the human were a naturally blind being, that he
were in fact deprived of intuition, even if it belongs to his essence: the
preliminary investigation would become an indefinite struggle against
an ever-renewing blindness and the beginning of real knowledge would
be indefinitely postponed.
Nowhere does Aristotle formulate this consequence. Yet it seems to
be implicated in the extremely frequent distinction that these classic
works institute between “that which is most known in itself”
(dksofj¿qbolk h^v~ ^ÂqÏ or ãmi¬t) or “by nature” (q∂ c·pbf), and “that
which is most known for us” (dksofj¿qbolk h^v~ ≠jât or moÌt ≠jât).
Here we recognize the contrast that book ^ establishes between the dif-
ficulty that is “in the things” and the one that is “in us,” but somewhat
congealed and radicalized: between the †k ≠jÿk of book ^ and the moÌt
≠jât of the classical texts, there is, one could say, a distance analogous
to the one that separates the appearance and the phenomenon in Kant.
The difficulty that comes forth “in relation to us” is no longer an obstacle
the suppression of which depends on us: One must reckon with a prop-
erly human order to the investigation, which is not only different from,
but the inverse of, that which would be the ideal order of knowledge;
and one cannot hope that this human order be a simple propaedeutic to
the ideal order.
This opposition gradually appears in Aristotle’s œuvre and, before
becoming a scholastic distinction,93 it is born spontaneously, as though
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under the very pressure of the questions. A text of the Topics on defini-
tion, it seems, makes us witness to its genesis. The manifestation of an
essence being proper to definition, it is clear that it must proceed in
terms more manifest, that is, better known than the term to be defined:
Since the definition is only given in view of making the term
posited known, and since we make things known not in taking just
any terms, but prior and better known terms, as is done in demon-
stration (for it is thus with all teaching given, afa^phî÷^ or
received, jávepft), it is clear that in not defining with terms of this
sort one has not defined at all. (Top. VI.4, 141a27f.)
Yet this rule, which simply makes the universal exigency of a preexist-
ing knowledge apply to the particular case of definition, can be under-
stood in two ways: “Either, one supposes that the terms [of the poor
definition] are less known in the absolute sense [ãmi¬t], or one sup-
poses that they are less known for us; for the two cases can present
themselves” (Top. VI.4, 141b3). “In the absolute sense,” Aristotle speci-
fies, “the prior is better known than the posterior”: thus, the point is
better known than the line, the line is better known than the surface,
the surface is better known than the solid, or, even, the unity is better
known than the number and the letter is better known than the sylla-
ble. Here we recognize the coincidence, maintained by the Protrepticus,
between ontological priority and epistemological priority, between the
order of generation and the order of knowledge. But in fact, and in rela-
tion to us, at times the opposite occurs: it is in fact the solid that before
all else comes to the senses, and the surface before the line, and the
line before the point. If one thus defines by that which is most known
for us, one would say: “the point is the limit of the line, the line is that
of the surface, and the surface that of the solid” (Top. VI.4, 141b21). Yet
that is to define the prior by the posterior and to proceed obscurum per
obscurius. On the contrary, “a correct definition must define by kind
and by differences,” determinations that, “in the absolute sense,” are
better known than the species and are prior to it: “for the elimination of
kind and difference leads to the elimination of the species, so that there
they are notions prior to the species.” Here one recognizes the definition
of the prior according to nature and essence,94 which coincides now with
the prior according to discourse. That which is first from this double
point of view is the universal: generator of the species, and through the
species, of the individual,95 it must be said, thus known, before that
which it engenders. Thus the good definition of the point would be: the
point is a “situated unity” (jlkàt vbqÏt) (Met. B.6, 1016b25, 30), a defi-
nition that presupposes as known the most universal kind of unity, and
the determination, itself more universal than the defined,96 of position
in space.
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The definition of the point as the limit of the line is certainly valid,
but as a second best, in the employment of those whose minds are not
insightful enough to know first that which is the most known abso-
lutely. Aristotle has not yet lost hope of reaching the order of intelligi-
bility in itself; it is a question of the insight of the mind, thus of exer-
cise: “For the same people, at different times, there are different things
that are most known: in the beginning, it is sensible objects but, when
the mind then becomes more insightful, it is the opposite” (Top. VI.4,
142a3). It can thus happen that “there is identity in fact between that
which is most known for us and that which is most known absolutely”
(Top. VI.4, 141b23).
Yet as Aristotle’s thought develops, it does seem that the perspective
of this coincidence is deferred more and more. In book X of the
Metaphysics, it is no longer a question of a shortage of insight, but of a
permanent servitude of human knowledge. The most insightful mind
there is, that of the philosopher, does not even escape the common con-
dition: “It is among sensible beings that our investigations [on essence]
must begin. . . . Everyone proceeds thus in the examination: it is by
that which is less knowable in itself that one arrives at things more
knowable” (Met. X.3, 1029a34f.). The task (¢odlk) that befalls the
method would thus be to “render knowable for us that which is know-
able in itself.”97 Thus Aristotle considers as natural here the imbalance
between the two orders: as for their coincidence, it is to be gained by a
likely laborious approach, which defines human investigation as such.
If there are thus two points of departure, that of the investigation and
that of knowledge, or as Theophrastus would say, a point of departure
“for us,” which is the sensible, and an “absolute” point of departure,
which is the intelligible,98 could we never attain this point that is the
most distant from us and that is nonetheless the beginning of true
knowledge? But then is there not some irony in speaking of a “point of
departure,” which is for us a term barely glimpsed, and of a cognizabil-
ity in itself that would not be a cognizability for anyone? The Topics, we
have seen, was content to distinguish between the coarse and the
“insightful” mind and to reserve for the latter access to knowledge in
itself. Yet, in the Metaphysics, the mind of the philosopher is reduced to
the condition of the coarse, and the expression most knowable in itself
is finally emptied of all reference to actual human knowledge.
The commentators will deal with the consequences of this by finally
assimilating that which is knowable in itself or by nature to that which
is knowable by God.99 We thus find again, from another angle, the apo-
ria that Aristotle would encounter in his analysis of the conditions of
wisdom: Wisdom is easy in itself and first in the order of knowledge,
since it bears on that which is the most knowable. Yet perhaps it is
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only first and easy for God, that is, for a being that would be gifted in
intellectual intuition and of which the knowledge, if it exists,100 would
be descending and productive, in the image of the genesis of things.101
2.3
We have seen certain neo-Platonic commentators use the distinction of

priority in itself and of priority for us in order to reconcile the title of
metaphysics with the first characteristic of its object.102 A contemporary
exegete, Hans Reiner, believed it could be concluded from this that the
title Metaphysics was Aristotelian in spirit103 (seinem Sinn und Geist
nach). 104 But it is one thing to recognize a meaning in the title
Metaphysics, and another to recognize this meaning as Aristotelian. In
explaining that metaphysics is posterior to physics for us, though its
object is—or rather because its object is—prior in itself to the physical
object, Alexander and Asclepius seem to contrast the order of knowl-
edge and the order of being. Yet, we have seen, this reversal of the
ontological order and the epistemological order cannot be attributed
without reservation to Aristotle himself. While he contrasts the most
known in itself and the most known for us, he does not contrast being
and knowing, but two modes of knowledge: one de jure, and the other in
fact. The originality of his conception lies precisely in this idea of a
knowledge in itself, for which the ontologically first would be at the
same time the first known, an order that, as the theory of the Posterior
Analytics amply proves, is the very order of demonstrative science. Yet
it is hard to see that first philosophy, often designated as the highest of
sciences, could obey another order than this. One must then take a
stand despite the commentators: theology was called first philosophy by
Aristotle, not only because its object was first in the order of being, but
also because theology itself had to be first in the order of knowledge.
The ingeniousness of the commentators is worth nothing here: Aristotle
could not have wanted to call first philosophy a philosophy that, even
just for us, would come after physics, for then this philosophy would
either not be first, or would not be a philosophy, that is, a science, since
it would not follow the order of cognizability in itself.
The fact remains that the title Metaphysics corresponds, better than
that of On First Philosophy, to the actual outlook of Aristotelian inves-
tigation and that one could not thus attribute its invention to a com-
plete aberration. The error of the commentators would rather be to
have wanted to make Metaphysics the title of first philosophy, as if the
“post-physics” investigations could actualize the Aristotelian vision of a
science “prior to physics.” Thenceforth, they could only resolve the para-
dox by playing on the apparently numerous meanings of “prior” and
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“posterior.” Yet if, as we have tried to show, one must at once take seri-
ously the priority of first philosophy and the posteriority of meta-
physics, that is, see in both cases a temporal order of succession, one
would admit that the two titles cannot apply to the same speculation.
Metaphysics is thus not first philosophy. But what else could it be? The
conclusions of the previous section authorize us in responding: the title
of Metaphysics, while it does not suit first philosophy or theology,
applies without difficulty to that science, without name in Aristotle’s
own works, and that takes as its object, not divine being, but being in
its universality, that is, being qua being. To confuse under the ambigu-
ous name of metaphysics the science of being qua being and that of the
divine or, as we will say from now on, ontology and theology,105 was to
doom to ignorance the specificity of the former while altering the con-
ception of the latter; it was to attribute to the former a priority that
only belongs to the latter, and to the latter a posteriority that is the fact
of the former.
However, to expose the confusion is not yet to understand it: if meta-
physics is not first philosophy, if the science of being qua being cannot
be reduced to that of divine being, one would have to show how the one
and the other are ordinate, subordinate, or implicated, to the point
where the commentators, and after them most interpreters, sponta-
neously confused them.106
Translated by Anna Strelis
NOTES
1. Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Probleme der Metaphysik, vol. 3 of

Gesamtausgabe, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt am
Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991), p. 18; Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1997), p. 5: “Thus, ‘Metaphysics’ simply remains the title for the philo-
sophical difficulty.”
2. Aristotle, Metaphysics E.1, 1003a21. In conformity with the current stan-
dard, we designate the books of the Metaphysics with their corresponding
Greek letters and the books of Aristotle’s other works with Roman numerals.
References to the citations of commentators, unless otherwise indicated,
refer to Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, ed. Hermann Diels, 23 vols.
(Berlin: Reimer, 1882–1909).
3. Cicero, Academica Posteriora I.5, 19.
4. Sextus Empiricus, Adversos Mathematicos VII, 16.
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5. Certain German interpreters of the nineteenth century, doubtless under

the influence of Hegel, did not hesitate to include metaphysics among logi-
cal speculations. See Heinrich Ritter, Histoire de la philosophie, trans.
Joseph Tissot, Jacques Trullard, and Paul Armand Challmel-Lacour, vol.
3 (Paris: Ladrange, 1861), p. 54; Carl Prantl, Geschichte der Logik, vol. 1
(Leipzig: Hirzel, 1867), p. 89. Yet nothing in Aristotle authorizes such an
interpretation: the adjective ildfhÏt never designates for him logic in the
sense of the modern term (which he calls “analytics”), but is practically
synonymous with afîbhqfhÏt and consequently excludes from its field of
application speculations appropriate to their object, that is, scientific, as
metaphysical speculations claim to be. As for analytics, it is not a science,
but a propaedeutic through which it is necessary to pass “before reaching
any science” (Met. E.3, 1005b2).
6. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), bk. VII, chaps. 39–40.
Epicureans likewise distinguished between three parts of philosophy:
canonic, physics, and ethics (Lives, bk. X, chaps. 29–30).
7. Diogenes, Lives, bk. I, prol., 17–9.
8. Diogenes, Lives, bk. V, chap. 1.
9. Strabo, Geography, trans. Horace L. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1929), bk. XIII, chap. 54; Plutarch, Life of Sulla, §26.
10. Léon Robin, Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1944), p.
11; cf. Jean-Marie Le Blond, “Aristote et Théophraste: Un renouvellement
radical de la question aristotélicienne,” Critique 8 (1952), p. 858 (on Josef
Zürcher’s book, Aristoteles Werk und Geist [Daderborn: Schönigh, 1952]).
11. As several recent works have shown. For a good elaboration of the ques-
tion see Jules Tricot, introduction to Aristote, La Metaphysique, trans.
Jules Tricot, rev. ed. (Paris: Bibliotheque des Textes Philosophiques,
1953), pp. vii–viii.
12. Strabo, Geography, bk. XIII, chap. 54; trans. mod. The last expression
(vùpbft iehrv÷wbfk) is frankly pejorative: iehrv÷wbfk is only said in a
pompous and empty way (cf. Cicero, Epistolae ad Atticum I.14).
13. Ettore Bignone, L’Aristotele perduto e la formazione filosofica di Epicuro
(Florence: La Nuovo Italia, 1936).
14. Raymond Weil, review of Les listes anciennes des ouvrages d’Aristote, by
Paul Moraux, Revue Philosophique 143 (1953), p. 466.
15. This is not to say that one cannot find, for example in ancient Stoicism,
metaphysical moments. Here we are speaking of metaphysics as an
autonomous science, conscious of its autonomy and possessing its own
domain: It is evident that the Stoics have no conception of such a science
and never posit being qua being as the thematic object of their investiga-
tions.
16. Cf. Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, “Blocage mental et machinisme” (paper presented
to the Institut Français de Sociologie, April 1937); and Machinisime et
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FINAL 11/14/08 2:39 PM Page 39
philosophie, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947), pp.

xii–xiii.
17. Werner Jaeger, Aristoteles: Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung
(Berlin: Weidmann, 1923).
18. “If men had the eyes of Lynceus so that their sight penetrated all obsta-
cles, would they not, with their eyes plunging into the viscera, find
Alcibiades’ body, so beautiful superficially, actually quite vile?” (Aristotle,
Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta, ed. Valentini Rose [1886;
repr. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1996], frag. 59, cited by Boethius, Consolatio
Philosophiae III, 8). The two texts were compared by Pierre-Maxime
Schuhl, “Le thème de Lyncée et l’anatomie,” in chap. 3 of L’imagination et
le merveilleux [Paris: Flammarion, 1952], p. 82), pp. 107–12.
19. Here one could appeal to Plato’s example: to allow an idea of mud or of
hair is not to eliminate philosophy, but to actualize it; if the young
Socrates shies away from allowing such ideas, it is because he is not
philosopher enough: “It is that you are still young, Socrates, and philoso-
phy has not yet taken hold of you, as it will do, I am sure, when you no
longer look down upon any of these things” (Parmenides, 130D–E).
20. One must obviously exclude Theophrastus’ metaphysical writings. Yet
nothing proves that they were not composed in Aristotle’s very lifetime,
before his final evolution. Josef Zürcher’s Aristoteles Werk und Geist,
excessive as its conclusions are, has nevertheless shown how difficult it
was to distinguish Theophrastus’ corpus from that of Aristotle.
21. The attribution to Aristo of Ceos, fourth scholarch of the Lyceum, was
recently supported by Paul Moraux, Les listes anciennes des ouvrages
d’Aristote (Leuven: Éditions Universitaires, 1951), pp. 233ff.
22. It is found in Eduard Zeller, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics, trans.
Benjamin Francis, Conn Costelloe, and John Henry Muirhead (London:
Longs, Green and Company, 1897), pp. 76ff.; and Hamelin, Ross, and
Jaeger. It is allowed by Heidegger, Kant und das Probleme der
Metaphysik, p. 16; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p.5.
23. Cf. Moraux, Les listes anciennes, esp. pp. 173, 239, and 304.
24. Philoponus, In Aristotelis categorias commentaria, 5.16f. Similar discus-
sions took place to know in what order Plato’s dialogues should be read
and published. A trace of these polemics is found in Albinus’ Prologue, in
which he, for his part, leans towards a systematic classification: “What
we want to find is the beginning and the order of the teaching according to
wisdom” (trans. René Le Corre, in Revue philosophique 81 [1956], p. 35).
25. If one believes Moraux on the subject, there would not meanwhile be any
conclusion, for the interpretation of the title Metaphysics, to draw from
Andronicus’ preoccupations. For, according to him, the title jbqà qà
crpfhá would come well before the Andronican edition (and a fortiori
before Nicolaus of Damascus’), since it would have figured, from the end of
the third century BCE onward in the list established by Aristo of Ceos,
from which derive Diogenes’ and the Anonymous’ catalogues. Of course,
the title is not found in Diogenes, but this absence would be accidental
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(Moraux, Les listes anciennes, p. 188). The Anonymous, on the other hand,
mentions a Metaphysics in ten books, which would represent the pre-
Andronican state of this treatise. Andronicus would have had no other
role but to add to this original Metaphysics the books currently designated
by ^, B, I, and J, which would finally result in our Metaphysics in four-
teen books, attested to by Ptolemy’s catalogue (ibid., p. 279). On the role of
Andronicus, Moraux moreover follows the opinion of Werner Jaeger,
Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles (Berlin:
Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1912), pp. 177–80. Hans Reiner, “Die
Entstehung und ursprüngliche Bedeutung des Namens Metaphysik,” in
Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 8 (1954), pp. 210–37, drew from
Moraux’s work to conclude that the title Metaphysics would have been
directly inspired by Aristotle’s own indications and would have been used
from the first generation of the Lyceum onward: the authorship could
have been attributed to Eudemus, whom we know, moreover (Asclepius,
In Aristotelis metaphysicorum commentaria, 4.4–16; Pseudo-Alexander, In
Aristotelis Metaphysica commentaria, 515.3–11), would have been occu-
pied with updating Aristotle’s metaphysical writings. In light of these
works, one point seems henceforth gained: the title jbqà qà crpfhá does
not designate an order of succession in a catalogue (Moraux remarks on
this subject that, in the original list reconstituted by him, the Metaphysics
does not follow the works of physics, but the works of mathematics) but
responds, even and especially if it is born in the circle of Aristotle’s imme-
diate successors, to a doctrinal intention.
26. Max Heinze, Vorlesungen Kants über Metaphysik aus drei Semestern
(Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1894), p. 186. Cf. Kant, “Über die Fortschritte der
Metaphysik seit Leibniz und Wolff,” in vol. 8 of Werke, ed. Ernst Cassirer
(Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923), pp. 301–21.
27. Rudolf Eucken, Geschichte der philosophischen Terminologie (Leipzig: Veit
and Company, 1879), p. 133.
28. For Saint Thomas, metaphysics is the science of the transphysical (In
duodecim libros metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio [Rome: Marietti,
1977], proem.), that is, of “divine things” (Summa theologiae, vols. 4–12 of
Opera omnia [Rome: Editori di San Tomasso, 1888–], pt. II, ii, q. 9, art. 2,
obj. 2). Having the same object as theology, it only differs by the mode of
knowledge.
29. Simplicius, In Aristotelis Physicorum libros quattor priores commentaria,
1.17–21.
30. Simplicius, In Phys., 257.20–6.
31. Met. K.1, 1076a10f.; cf. Met. @.1, 995b14; Met. @.2, 997a34f.
32. Hence Zeller, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics, pp. 76ff.
33. Alexander of Aphrodisias, In Aristotelis Metaphysicorum commentaria, B,
171, 5–7.
34. Reiner, “Die Enstehung und ursprüngliche Bedeutung,” p. 215.
35. Asclepius, In Aristotelis Metaphysicorum libros ?–X, proem., 3, 28–30.
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36. Asclepius, In Met., proem., 8–13, 19–22.

37. See below, pp. 21–38.
38. Cf. Alexander of Aphrodisias, Commentaria in Aristotelis Metaphysicorum,
B, 171, 5: “wisdom or theology, which he [Aristotle] also calls meta-
physics”; Asclepius, In Met., 1, 19: “The work has for a title Metaphysics
because Aristotle, after having previously dealt with things of physics,
then deals with this discipline of divine things.”
39. Cf. the numerous texts cited by Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in
the Aristotelian Metaphysics, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1951), pp. 3ff., which, moreover, subscribe to this
assimilation.
40. Heidegger, Kant und das Probleme der Metaphysik, p. 17; Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics, p. 4.
41. Theophrastus, Metaphysica 1, 4a2.
42. Asclepius cites no less than four titles for the Metaphysics: “It should be
noted that [this treatise] is also entitled Wisdom [plc÷^] or Philosophy or
First Philosophy or Metaphysics,” which are equivalent expressions for
him. After having explained why Aristotle called his treatise Wisdom
(which is a sort of clarification [l⁄lkb◊ pácbfá qft lÍp^]), he cites a refer-
ence to this title by Aristotle, drawn from the Apodictics (3, 27ff.). Yet we
do not know of an Apodictics by Aristotle, and the catalogues make no
mention of it. As for the Posterior Analytics, which we could consider,
nowhere do they refer to a mbo◊ plc÷^t. This testimony is thus suspect,
and furthermore, it may be that Asclepius did not see that the designa-
tions mbo◊ cfilplc÷^t (and maybe also mbo◊ plc÷^t) simply refer to
Aristotle’s De philosophia, and not to the Metaphysics (thus in Phys. II.2,
194a36, the reference †k qlÿt mbo◊ cfilplc÷^t can only refer to the De
philosophia, and not to an esoteric work of Aristotle’s). As for the refer-
ence mbo◊ plc÷^t, it also seems to refer to the De philosophia, if it is true
that that comparison plc÷^-pácbf^, which we sought in vain in the
Metaphysics, was already to be found in the De philosophia (cf. André
Jean Festugière, Le Dieu cosmique, vol. 2 of La révélation d’Hermès
Trismegiste [Paris: Lecoffre, 1949], p. 588, who cites in this sense a paral-
lel text of Philoponus, In Nicomachi Isagogen 1, 8, which he considers a
loan from Aristotle). The fact remains that Aristotle himself proposed, if
not four titles (a multiplicity that must have seemed suspect to the com-
mentators), at least one: mbo◊ q´t mo¿qet cfilplc÷^t, which would
suffice in order to ask the question: Why were the first publishers not sat-
isfied with this title?
43. According to Alexander, In Met., 258, 24–38, first mathematics would be
arithmetic, second mathematics would be plane geometry, and posterior
mathematics would be solid geometry, astronomy, etc.
44. Thus Gaston Colle, trans., Aristotle, La Metaphysique (Paris: F. Alcan,
1931), ad 1004a2–9.
45. This tripartition would become classic, often combined, moreover, with the
Stoic schema, only in the imperial epoch, thus after Andronicus’ edition. Cf.
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Albinus, Didaskalikos 3, which divides philosophy into dialectical philoso-

phy (=logic), practical philosophy (=morality), and theoretical philosophy, of
which physics would only be one part, next to theology and mathematics.
On the intermediary position occupied by mathematics in the Aristotelian
tripartition, cf. Philip Merlan, “The Subdivisions of Theoretical
Philosophy,” chap. 3 of From Platonism to Neoplatonsim (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 59–87; see my Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, pt. 2,
chap. 1, §1, p. 323.
46. Separate (usofpqÏt) has a double meaning in Aristotle, and designates:
(1) that which is separated from matter (thus, in DA II.1, 413a4, kl„t, by
the difference by the `ru©, is called “separate” from the body); (2) that
which is subsistent on its own and thus does not need anything else to
exist (see Met., B.18, 1022a35: afÌ qÌ hbusofpjùklk h^v~ ^ÂqÏ); in this
sense, “separation” is the fundamental property of “substance.” These two
meanings coincide in Plato, for whom the idea, separate from the sensible,
was at the same time the only subsistent reality. They no longer coincide
in Aristotle: thus physical substance is separate from the second meaning,
but not from the first; mathematical being is separate from the first mean-
ing, but not from the second (for it is an abstraction which does not exist
on its own). From that, the uncertainty of the publishers in the reading of
C.1, 1026a14, where the object of physics is defined: some, following
Pseudo-Alexander and the manuscripts, read äu¿ofpq^ (Bekker, Bonitz,
Apelt, D.R. Cousin, Paul Gohlke, Joseph Owens); but Schwegler, followed
by Christ, Jaeger, Ross, Cherniss, and Merlan, corrects—appropriately,
we believe—äu¿ofpq^ into u¿ofpq^ in order to conserve the contrast
with mathematical objects, which, in the next line, are called l‰ u¿ofpq^
(here, it is thus a matter of separation in the sense of subsistence). As for
divine being, it is called “separate” in both senses: Platonism remains true
for Aristotle on the level of theology. On the reading of 1026a14, cf., lastly,
Vianney Décarie, “La physique se porte-t-elle sur des ‘non-séparés’,” Revue
des Sciences Philosophiques Théologiques 38 (1954), pp. 466–8 (which
defends, but without bringing in decisive factors, the lesson of the
manuscripts); and Émile de Strycker, “La notion aristotélicienne de sépa-
ration dans son application aux Idées de Platon,” in Autour d’Aristote:
Receuil d’études de philosophie ancienne et médiévale offert à Monseigneur
A. Mansion, ed. J. Moreau (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1955),
which reads usofpqá (p. 131n. 68).
47. In Metaphysics C.1, cf. the lines 1026a16 and 1026a19.
48. The eclectic tradition, in taking up the Aristotelian schema, would not be
mistaken. Thus Albinus presents theological science as vblildfhÌk jùolt
(q´t cfilplc÷^t) (Didaskalikos 3).
49. Thus Met. E.3, 1005b1; Phys. I.9, 192a36, II.2, 194b9f.; DA I.1, 403b16 (the
mo¬qlt cfiÏplclt is contrasted at once to the physician and the math-
ematician). The expression “second philosophy” often designates physics:
Met. X.11, 1037a15; PA II.7, 653a9; Long. Vit. 1, 464b33.
50. Met. C.1, 1026a27; cf. E.3, 1005a31f.
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51. One thinks of the contest instituted by Plato in the Philebus between the
different sciences for the constitution of the good life. In these passages,
Plato already distinguished between “first” sciences (62D), which are the
“divine” sciences (62B), and the other sciences, which have to do with
“that which is born and perishes” (61E). Found here is a direction of
thought that has nothing to do with the one that brings Aristotle, in addi-
tion, to the definition of a science of being qua being.
52. In particular, the use of the particle db j©k. The inauthenticity was
equally maintained, for internal reasons, by Paul Natorp, “Thema und
Disposition der aristotelischen Metaphysik,” Philosophische Monatshefte
24 (1888), pp. 37–65, 540–74; and recently by Mgr Mansion, “Philosophie
première, philosophie seconde et métaphysique chez Aristote,” Revue
philosophique de Louvain 56 (1958), pp. 165–227.
53. Pseudo-Alexander sees in book I a summary of books @, E, C. Bonitz,
Commentarius in Aristotelis Metaphysicam (1849; repr. Hildesheim: Georg
Olms Verlag, 1992); and Jaeger, Aristoteles, pp. 216–22, on the contrary,
see in it an earlier draft of these books. The reason that Jaeger gives is
the relatively Platonic resonance, according to him, of book I; it seems to
us, on the contrary, that the assimilation of first philosophy to the science
of being qua being manifests a radical evolution in relation to Platonism
and even to the “theological” definition of first philosophy: an evolution so
radical that it seems to us difficult to attribute it to Aristotle himself.
54. Theology or first philosophy, although a part of philosophy in general,
aims no less than it at universality: “it is universal because first” and, in
this sense, but only in this sense, it is not wrong to say that it also bears
“on being qua being” (Met. C.1, 1026a30–2). The fact remains that, even if
first philosophy is wholly confused with the science of being qua being, it
is first defined as theology. Yet we find an approach that is exactly the
inverse in book I: in the passage parallel to the preceding one, the author
asks himself “whether or not the science of being qua being must be con-
sidered as a universal science” (Met. I.7, 1064b6), a question that makes
no sense (or rather appeals to an obviously positive answer) from the
Aristotelian perspective, where this science is precisely defined by con-
trast to particular sciences; and the author of book I responds strangely:
yes, the science of being qua being is universal because it is theology, that
is, a “science prior to physics,” and that it is thus “universal by its very
priority” (Met. I.7, 1064b13).
55. Met. I.7, 1064a28. It is particularly in this passage that Jaeger finds a
vestige of Platonism. Yet it seems unlikely that Aristotle would have first
conceived being qua being and separate being as identical, just to then
disassociate them: being qua being and separate being are defined by
Aristotle by such independent paths that their coincidence, far from being
natural, seems miraculous. Their identification thus seems to be the work
of a zealous disciple, concerned with unifying after the fact the doctrine of
his teacher: the doctrine of chaps. 1–8 of book I bring to mind less that of
a yet Platonist Aristotle than it already announces the neo-Platonic com-
mentators.
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56. Meanwhile, it goes without saying that the passage I.1–8 reflects
Aristotle’s teaching on the other points. This is why we do not forbid our-
selves from citing it, except on the disputed doctrine.
57. And we have seen (above, pp. 11 and 40n.25), that there was reason to
doubt that it was, if it is true that the original Metaphysics in ten books,
attested to by the Anonymous’ catalogue, did not contain book I.
58. Yet it is evident that the classification of the sciences as such does not
come from theology.
59. If one allows this unitary perspective, which is that of book I and of the
commentators, it is no more, in the major part of the Metaphysics, a ques-
tion of ontology than of theology, and if the word “metaphysics” designates
this theological ontology, which bears on being qua being, that is, sepa-
rate, so it is, in most of the books of the Metaphysics, a question of every-
thing but metaphysics! This is the extreme conclusion (nowhere in the
Metaphysics does one find the actual exposition of Aristotle’s metaphysics)
of Owens, The Doctrine of Being, in taking up himself the unitary inter-
pretation that is that of book I and of the commentators, and pushing it
to its final consequences.
60. Cf. above, pp. 11–14.
61. Cf. Met., @.2, 996b3, I.1, 1059a35, I.1, 1059b1, I.1, 1059b13, etc.
62. Referring of course to those who interpret the “meta” of metaphysics as
signifying a chronological posteriority. For those who see, with Simplicus
and Syrianus, a simple relation of superiority, there is no longer a prob-
lem, since the “meta” of “metaphysics” and the first of “first philosophy”
thus have the same meaning, referring both to the transcendence of the
object. Yet this interpretation, which ignores the self-evident meanings of
these two terms, manifestly comes out of a concern with reconciling after
the fact two titles handed down by the tradition. In fact, this interpreta-
tion of jbqá is philologically untenable (“in the order of value, of rank,”
jbqá designates a relation of posteriority, that is, of inferiority: Henry
George Liddell and Robert Scot, Greek-English Lexicon [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1889], s.v. jbqá). As for the corresponding interpreta-
tion of mo¿qe in mo¿qe cfilplc÷^, it is, as we will see, philosophi-
cally contestable.
63. Met. C.1, 1026a10; cf. C.1, 1026a29; I.7, 1064b13.
64. Met. B.11, 1019a1f. Platonic texts explicitly containing this definition of
“prior” are not known. This is why Ross allows, with Trendelenburg, that
this could be a reference to Plato’s non-written teaching. Cf. Hans
Joachim Krämer, Der Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik (Amsterdam:
Gruner, 1964), pp. 24, 106.
65. Met. B.11, 1019a5: mo¬qlk jûk qÌ Âmlhb÷jbklk moÏqbolk, afÌ ≠ l‰p÷^
moÏqbolk. One could be surprised by the petitio principii that Aristotle
seems to commit in presenting here the l‰p÷^ as prior h^qà c·pfk h^◊
l‰p÷^k (1019a2–3). In reality, in the latter expression, the word l‰p÷^ is
not used in the technical sense that Aristotle employs it two lines later.
The priority h^qà q™k l‰p÷^k is priority according to being; but since
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being, according to Aristotle, includes a plurality of significations (or cate-

gories), it is not unhelpful to specify that l‰p÷^ is the first of these signifi-
cations of being (cf. Met. X.1, 1028a29f.).
66. The word äkáirpft just as much designates, in fact, the regressive inves-
tigation of means from end, as of causes from effects. It is possible that
Aristotle had known the mathematical meaning of this term, which,
attested to by Philodemus, Index Academicorum, 17, would have been
established in method by Pappus.
67. It is from the triple point of view of efficiency, matter, and form that the
essence (l‰p÷^) is called prior “according to nature and essence” (Met.
B.11, 1019a5). One would thus not be surprised that, in the case of
essence, logical priority and chronological priority, far from contrasting,
coincide (Met. X.1, 1028a32–b2).
68. Cf. PA II.1, 646a12f.; GA II.6, 742a21.
69. PA II.1, 646a35f. One will remark here that logical order is contrasted to
chronological order, while in Met. X.1, 1028a32–b2, essence was called
first at once logically and chronologically. It is because the iÏdlt itself is
multiple: in one case, it considers essence as substrate, efficient cause,
and the subject of attributes; in the other, as final cause.
70. René Descartes, Les Principes de la Philosophie, in vol. 9 of Œuvres des
Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Libraire J. Vrin,
1964–9), p. 14; Principles of Philosophy, in vol. 1 of The Philosophical
Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and
Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 186.
71. Descartes, Les Principes, p. 2; Principles, pp. 179–80.
72. “The most knowable things are principles [qà mo¬q^] and causes: for it
is through them and from them that other things are known, but they are
not known through things that are subordinate to them” (Met. ?.2,
982b2).
73. Aristotle, Fragmenta, frag. 52. On this opposition between this fumbling
progress of technical subjects and the rapid progress of philosophy, see
my Le problème de l’être, p. 74.
74. Aristotle, Fragmenta, frag. 52. Ross translates: “The fact that all men feel
at home in philosophy” (Aristotle, Protrepticus, trans. W.D. Ross, in vol. 12
of The Works of Aristotle Translated into English [Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1962], p. 33).
75. Aristotle, Fragmenta, frag. 52.
76. Ibid.
77. “It is much more necessary to have knowledge of causes and elements
than of things that derive from them; for the latter are not part of the
supreme elements [q¬k åousk] and the first principles [qà mo¿q^]
are not born of them, but on the contrary it is from them [first principles]
and through them that all the rest is manifestly produced and constituted.
If thus fire, air, number or some other nature are causes of other causes
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and first in relation to them, it is impossible for us to know anything else

if we are ignorant of them” (Aristotle, Fragmenta, frag. 5). It is thus not
only a matter of a deduction of truths, as for Descartes, but also of a rela-
tion of production; or rather, for Aristotle, the deduction only reproduces
the very process by which the things are produced.
78. Met. ?.9, 992b29. Alexander pertinently remarks that the “science of all
things” can only be the “science of the principles of all things,” for “if a
thing has principles, one only knows this thing if one knows its princi-
ples” (In Met. 129, 15–6).
79. Leon Brunschvicg, L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), p. 157.
80. One could object that Aristotle sometimes contrasts the order of genera-
tion and the order of essence, that is, of discourse: the perfect is prior
according to essence, but only appears at the end of the generation (cf.
Met. A.8, 989a15 and above, p. 46n.68), a principle that, we have noted, is
especially invoked in the biological works. Yet all of Aristotle’s efforts tend
to prove that this apparently ascendant order of generation is only made
possible by the aspiration of matter toward a form that is at the same
time a final, and even efficient, cause. There is no creative evolution for
Aristotle: the essence of the perfect is not at the end but at the beginning
of the process; the apparently ascendant movement of generation is but
the elimination of obstacles that stand in the way of the truly descendant
movement of the form. In this way, the deductive order of knowledge coin-
cides nicely with the real order of generation.
81. It is characteristic that Aristotle, in the Posterior Analytics, comes to give
this purely negative definition of the principle: “I understand by principle
in each kind these truths of which the existence is impossible to demon-
strate” (I.10, 76a31). By formulas of this sort, Aristotle does not so much
want to express the transcendence of the principle as the impotency of
human discourse. It is only in neo-Platonism that the negation would
refer back to the ineffable transcendence of the principle and would thus
paradoxically become mediation, even of access to the one. In Aristotle,
negation is only negation: it is here more than elsewhere that one must be
wary of retrospective interpretations, too often accredited by the Greek
and especially scholastic commentators. On this point, see my Le prob-
lème de l’être, pp. 231f.
82. NE VI.6, 1141a6: ib÷mbq^f kl„k bflk^f q¬k äou¬k. The verb ib÷mbq^f
often introduces in Aristotle what one could call a “residual explanation.”
We will see that this sort of explanation is particularly frequent when it
comes to kl„t or God. Cf. GA II.3, 736b27.
83. On the synonymity of ähof_ùt and p^cùt, see Top. II.4, 111a8.
84. Aristotle, Fragmenta, frag. 5.
85. This hypothesis was already rejected by Plato: “Jealousy comes nowhere
near the chorus of the gods” (Phaedrus 247A); cf. Timaeus 29A. This idea
would often be invoked as a sort of aphorism by authors of the middle
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FINAL 11/14/08 2:39 PM Page 47
ages. Cf. William of Auvergne, De universo, vol. 1 (Paris: Aureliae, 1674),

I, II, chap. 9: “Invidia et avaritia sunt in ultimate elongationis a Creatore.”
86. Georges Rodier, Aristote: Ethique à Nicomaque, livre X (Paris: Libraire
Charles Delagrave, 1897), p. 119n. 2; cf. his Etudes de philosophie grécque,
2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1957), p. 214.
87. Cf. NE X.7, 1177b31: “We must not listen to people who advise us, men
that we are, to have simply human thoughts, and, mortals that we are, to
have simply mortal thoughts, but we must as much as possible make our-
selves immortal [†c~ Úplk †kaùubq^f äv^k^q÷wbfk].” Aristotle thus
openly combats a qualm often expressed by the Greeks. Cf. Epicharmus,
DK 23B20: vk^qà uo™ qÌk vk^qÏk, l‰h ävák^q^ qÌk vk^qÌk colkbÿk
(cited by Aristotle, Rhet. II.21, 1394b25); Pindar, Isthmian 5, 20;
Sophocles, Ajax, 758f., frag. 590; and Euripides, Bacchae, 395, 427f.,
Alcestis, 799. The gravity of the Aristotelian defiance is measured in
recalling that a pretension of this sort had been charged as a crime
against Socrates. Cf. Joseph Moreau, L’âme du monde de Platon aux
Stoïciens (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1939), pp. 112–3. The Epinomis had
already combated the same reservation, but only to justify astronomical
observation (Epinomis, 988A).
88. The same paradox is found in the Kantian use of the word noumenon, in
the sense that “the intelligible, that is, the proper object of our intelli-
gence, is precisely [for Kant] that which escapes all the grasps of our intel-
ligence” (Jules Lachelier, “Sur le sens kantien de raison,” in Vocabulaire
Technique et Critique de la Philosophie, ed. André Lalande, 5th ed. [Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1947], p. 861).
89. See my Le problème de l’être, p. 75n. 4.
90. See my Le problème de l’être, pp. 75–6.
91. Met. ^.1, 993b8–9. The metaphor of blindness would be taken up by
Theophrastus, Meta. 8, 9b12, but in a quite different context; it has to do
with knowing where ascendant investigation of causes should stop: “When
we come to supreme and first realities [qà åho^ h^◊ mo¬q^] them-
selves, we are no longer capable of continuing, either because they do not
have a cause, or because of the weakness of our sight in focusing, in a
way, on these dazzling lights [afà q™k ≠jbqùo^k äpvùkbf^k Δpmbo
moÌt qà csqbfkÏq^q^ _iùmbfk].” One can see that it is not a matter of
explaining the difficulty in fact of philosophy, but of establishing the limits
of investigation: for the Aristotle of book ^, as for Plato, blindness was a
prejudicial, though provisional, obstacle to the investigation of truth; for
Theophrastus, it symbolizes a limit, definitive without a doubt, but only
encountered at the end of the investigation.
92. “If we do not have knowledge of the idea of good, knowing all there is out-
side of it as perfectly as it is possible—that, you know, would be worth
nothing to us, just as without possession of the good, possession of all
other things is useless to us” (Rep. VII, 505A–B).
93. The scholastics would distinguish between that which is most known
quoad nos and that which is most known simpliciter. Certain texts of the
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FINAL 11/14/08 2:39 PM Page 48
Aristotelian corpus already seem to testify to a scholarization of these con-

cepts. Thus, in the Posterior Analytics, the affirmation of the priority of
premises (see above, p. 29, and Post. An. I.1, 71b29), brings about the fol-
lowing development: “Moreover, ‘prior’ and ‘most known’ have a double
signification, for there is no identity between that which is prior by nature
and that which is prior for us, nor between that which is most known by
nature and most known for us. I call ‘prior and most known for us’ the
objects that are closest to sensation, and ‘prior and most known in an
absolute way’ the objects that are farthest from the senses. And the most
universal causes are farthest from the senses, while the particular causes
are closest” (Post. An. I.2, 27a1). This passage, which also breaks the
chain of ideas, seems to us an interpolation; for, far from bringing clarity
to the theory of syllogism, it singularly compromises its application: for
syllogism to be humanly possible, the premises must be better known, not
only in themselves, but for us, than the conclusion. Yet we know that at
least one of the premises must be more universal than the conclusion,
which, according to the above doctrine, would make it less known for us
than the conclusion. It is thus hard to see what interest Aristotle would
have here in insisting on a distinction that reduces the rules of demon-
stration to impotency.
94. Cf. above, p. 22.
95. Here we are still in a Platonic perspective. Later, Aristotle will say that
only the individual engenders the individual.
96. Specific difference is more universal than species and even than kind. On
this point, see my Le problème de l’être, pp. 229f.
97. Met. X.3, 1029b7: “Likewise,” Aristotle specifies, “in practical life, our duty
is to go from each particular good so that the general good becomes the
good of each.” The coincidence between the particular and the general,
between the “for us” and the “in itself,” is not given, but is to be done, and
precisely with the “particular” means at our disposal. Asclepius, In Met.
383.5, cites the example of the legislator, who resorts to individual punish-
ment to realize virtue, which is universal. Pseudo-Alexander, In Met.
466.12–5, shows how the legislator can thus exercise an influence on the
economy: the law, in punishing the rich person who misuses his wealth,
chastises him for his own good, but also contributes to general prosperity.
98. Theophrastus, Meta. 8, 9b7.
99. Thus Pseduo-Alexander in his commentary on L.6, 1092b26–30. Aristotle
criticizes the Pythagorean theory according to which a mixture would be
so much more valuable if it could be expressed by a number that would
define its composition exactly. This criticism does not signify, Pseudo-
Alexander comments, that all mixture does not take place according to a
certain proportion, but there are cases in which this proportion is inacces-
sible to our intelligence, all while being “knowable for God and by nature”
(qÕ vbÕ aû h^◊ q∂ c·pbf dk¿ofjlk).
100. We know that in book J (9, 1074b15–35) Aristotle would dispute that God
knows the world. Yet, in book ? (2, 983a9), he tended to attribute to God
only knowledge of principles, and, consequently, in virtue of the very defi-
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nition of principle, of those things of which they are principles. It thus

seems that there was an evolution from the more traditional doctrine of
book ? to the properly Aristotelian doctrine of book J. But this very evolu-
tion may be understood: Aristotle would doubt more and more that the
sublunar world is linked to God as to its principle, for contingency, due to
the resistance of matter, introduces here a rift between God and the
world. There is thus no contradiction between these two passages, which
have often been appealed to one against the other in the question of know-
ing “whether Aristotle’s God knows the world or not.” On this polemic, cf.
Aquinas, In Met., bk. XII, l. 11, n. 2614.; Franz Brentano, Die Psychologie
des Aristoteles (Mainz: Kirchheim, 1867), p. 246 (who maintains, with
Saint Thomas, that God, in knowing Himself, knows all things); contra
Eduard Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen (Leipzig: Reisland, 1879–1909),
vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 371n. 1.
In reality, it is at once correct to say that the god knows itself as the
principle of all things (cf. Met. ?.2, 983a8), and that meanwhile it does not
know the world: the god is ignorant of the world to the very degree that the
world is not deduced from the principle, and one could add: only to this
degree. (In book J, Aristotle specifies that God cannot think the world
because that would be a “change for the worse” and that “there are things
that it is better not to see than to see” [1074b27 and 32]. If the world were
entirely deduced from the principle, it would participate in the principle’s
excellence, and this argument would fall.) Likewise, the artisan is igno-
rant of that which, in the work, stems from the resistance of the matter:
there is no science of the accident.
101. Real knowledge is, in fact, analogous to demiurgic action to the degree
that it coincides with the natural order of generation. Reciprocally, the
artisan’s activity would be a good introduction to knowledge (cf. Jean-
Marie Le Blond, “Les schèmes du métier,” in Logique et méthode chez
Aristote, 3rd. ed. [Paris: J. Vrin, 1973], pp. 326ff.). All intuition, one could
say, is originary, in the sense that Kant would understand this expression
in his Dissertation of 1770, in that it indissolubly founds a deduction and a
production, which, in Aristotle, would unfold in syllogism. It is thus not by
chance that the mechanism of syllogism reproduces the process of fertil-
ization. Cf. Brunschvicg, Qua ratione Aristoteles metaphysicam vim syllo-
gismo inesse demonstraverit (Paris: Alcan, 1897), p. 4. (Yet Brunschvicg
insists too exclusively on the biological character of this analogy: the fact
that Aristotle resorts, in other passages, to technological analogies proves
that biological fertilization and artisanal fabrication are only taken here
as particular illustrations of generation in general.)
102. Cf. above, p. 13. This tradition would be perpetuated in the Arabic com-
mentators. Cf. Averroes, Die Metaphysik des Averroes, trans. and ed. Max
Horton (Halle: Max Niemayer, 1912), p. 8; and Avicenna, The Metaphysics
of The Healing, trans. and ed. Michael E. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham
Young University Press, 2005), pp. 16–7, bk. 1 chap. 3, §13: “The meaning
of ‘[that which] is after nature’ [involves] a posteriority relative to us. . . .
As for that which this science, if considered in itself, deserves to be
named, [this] is to speak of it as the science of what is ‘prior to nature,’
because the matters investigated in this science are, in [terms of] essence
and generality, prior to nature.”
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103. [Here I have translated esprit with “spirit,” whereas all earlier instances
of the term have been rendered “mind.” Esprit can often refer to one or the
other, as with the German Geist.—Trans.]
104. Reiner, “Die Enstehung und ursprüngliche Bedeutung,” p. 228. Reiner
even sees there an argument in favor of the attribution of the title, if not
to Aristotle himself, at least to one of his immediate disciples, for example,
Eudemus (ibid., p. 237).
105. This vocabulary, otherwise self-evident, is that of chap. 4 of Jaeger,
Aristoteles.
106. This work was under publication when that of Vianney Décarie, L’objet de
la métaphysique selon Aristote (Paris: Vrin, 1961), appeared, which tends
to confirm the traditional interpretation, according to which the study of
being qua being would be subordinate to that of “substance,” as the conse-
quence is to its principle. Here, let us only say: (1) that this thesis seems
to us to ignore the rhetorical and sophistical origins of the problematic of
being qua being; (2) that it falls within the critiques that we address to
the unitary interpretations (even if, on an important point, it agrees with
ours in refusing to assimilate being qua being to the divine).
50

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Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

So bleibt Metaphysik der Titel für die Verlegenheit

Originally published as the introduction to Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de

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Aristotle himself, in a text where he is still under the Platonic influence,

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tion of a strange intellectual adventure. Moreover, if we believe the more

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Doubtless, it appeared simplest to grant that, if these writings had car-

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Until now we have spoken of “metaphysics” and of the science of being

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In antiquity, the order of Andronicus’ corpus was deemed so far from

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Indeed, the intrinsic interpretation of the title Metaphysics is the

And later on:

It has been objected that this interpretation is neo-Platonist. Yet

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ontological dignity of its object. Primacy is also synonymous with emi-

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Thus, first philosophy is to philosophy in general what arithmetic is to

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Finally, it is for first philosophy to examine aporias on the existence of

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the commentators, and, by allowing the identification of the science of

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prime mover (of which the necessity is demonstrated in more depth in

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ity of the commentators would apply itself to demonstrating their com-

2. First Philosophy or Metaphysics?

In all things, it is, as is said, the point of departure

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In what does this priority of first philosophy consist? The expres-

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this turning back is recognized and measured in a time that is the

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If it is true that primacy according to essence goes back to a certain

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phy: If philosophy is the science of first principles, and if first principles

In order to resolve the difficulties raised by the order of knowledge,

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The priority of premises would thus be at once logical, chronological,

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and first principles. One of its characteristics is exactness, which is just

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These passages of the Nicomachean Ethics are generally given an

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end of a process a knowledge that should be logically first?92 Yet Plato

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We have seen certain neo-Platonic commentators use the distinction of

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