Abstract

WE MUST CONSIDER CAREFULLY why Aristotle’s Metaphysics opens not with the question of being but with the question of knowledge. “All human beings desire to know” is the first sentence and raises the issue of the first two chapters, which, along with Nicomachean Ethics book 6, constitute Aristotle’s fullest treatment of the question of wisdom. Clearly, if we take seriously the order of the books of the Metaphysics as they have been transmitted to us, Book Α is an introduction. Yet what does it mean to be an introduction? We need not work backwards from the question of being in order to see the significance of the opening treatment of knowledge. In what follows I will argue that the question of wisdom is not simply Aristotle’s “informal introduction to the investigation of being,” but rather raises important questions which themselves generate a turn to an examination of being.