Parmenides is known for his view that change is but an illusion: nothing changes. The two major pre-Socratic philosophers traditionally associated with the issue of change are Parmenides and Heraclitus. They saw how living things grew up, matured, then broke down and died. Most notably, the pre-Socratic philosopher tried to make sense of a changing world, seeing it go from season to season.
The issue of change went back decades and centuries from the time of Aristotle. Plato, on the left, points upwards, towards an otherworldly realm of unchanging perfection, while Aristotle’s right hand seems to be grounded on an earth we know and experience through our senses.Īristotle felt that Plato’s theory of Forms does not address change. Raphael, School of Athens, detail (edited), fresco, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City (1509-1511) For things to exist, they have to have both substance and form. They are intrinsically linked to objects. For Plato, the Forms are abstract things, existing completely outside space and time.įor Aristotle, Forms do not exist independently of things. For Plato, the Forms are the perfect, ideal, eternal things to which correspond those perishable things and properties that we find in the world. In Metaphysics, Aristotle criticizes Plato’s theory of Forms.
However, in more recent times (such as the middle ages), it also took on a new meaning, referring to the study of that which is beyond the physical. The word derives from Aristotle’s own works in Greek, with meta meaning “after” and physika meaning “physics.” The term is thought to be the result of an editorial decision by Aristotle’s editor, Andronicus of Rhodes, who placed the books on first philosophy right after the works on physics, and called them, quite literally, “the books that come after the books on physics.” It examines the relationship between mind and matter, between substances, or the individual “things” in the world, and their attributes, or characteristics. It tries to answer questions about how things are and about how things change to become something else. Metaphysics is concerned with questions about the fundamental nature of existence, being, and the world. Aristotle calls metaphysics “first philosophy”, and says that it deals with “first causes” and the “principles of things,” Metaphysics is one of the main branches of philosophy, along with ethics, aesthetics, logic, epistemology, and others.
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