Repository | Book | Chapter

Philosophers' interests in the nature of their investigations go back to Greek philosophy. When Parmenides recommended the Way of Truth and warned against another mode of philosophical proceeding, he spoke about philosophical methodology. The same did Aristotle in his characterization of prote filosofia (the first philosophy) as the science of being qua being. In fact, it would be quite difficult to find any philosopher who entirely abstained from at least some remarks about his way of doing philosophy. This tendency culminated in the 20th century and became classified under the label "metaphilosophy." The word belongs to the family of terms with the prefix "meta." The noun "metaphysics" is the prototype here. It was Alexander of Aphrodisias, an Aristotelian scholar, who invented this word. According to the most popular explanation, Alexander ordered Aristotle's works in a way that the books devoted to the first philosophy were placed just after Physics. Thus, the word "metaphysics" arose as a composition of "meta" (after) and "physics" and originally meant "after physics." However, some historians of ancient philosophy suggest that our word was intentionally introduced in order to point out considerations of a special kind, namely reflection about nature (physis) and its theory. Anyway, this more substantial application of the word "metaphysics" very soon became official.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-0151-8_2

Full citation: