ABSTRACT
Philosophers have disagreed about the nature of metaphysics. Aristotle and the medievals give us two different accounts of the discipline. Sometimes, they characterize it as the attempt to identify the first causes, in particular, God or the Unmoved Mover; sometimes, as the very general science of being qua being. They believed, however, that these two characterizations identify one and the same discipline. The rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by contrast, expanded the scope of metaphysics. They took it to be concerned not merely with the existence and nature of God, but also with the distinction between mind and body, the immortality of the soul, and freedom of the will.
