Aristotle's First Philosophy and the First Philosophers

The author addresses the issue of the origin of the discipline that we call metaphysics. First he briefly describes the difficulties associated with Aristotle's extant metaphysical concept: problems with the character of his treatise Metaphysics, problems with the arrangement of the individual books, and even problems with the title - all related to the problematic lack of clarity in the discipline itself. He then presents an overview of the common solutions to these difficulties in the conclusion to the first part of the article. In the second part, the author provides a detailed analysis of one of the possible interpretative hypotheses: that Aristotle's metaphysics is a continuation of the pre-Socratic tradition and, in fact, only explicitly articulates a general, foundational theme of philosophy. This interpretation is closely related to Jan Pataka's universal concept of metaphysics. By analyzing the textual evidence of the doctrines of the archetypal pre-Socratic candidates for a first metaphysics, the author concludes that, in agreement with recent research, these thinkers do not share Aristotle's metaphysical approach. Differently from Pataka, the author thereby concludes that we can meaning-fully talk about a pre-metaphysical philosophy.