ABSTRACT
Aristotle’s Metaphysics contains his most mature and difficult inquiry into substance and being. The work begins on a now familiar, optimistic-sounding note: ‘All human beings’, proclaims Aristotle, ‘by nature, desire to know’ (Meta. 980a1).1 He does not develop this contention in the beginning of the Metaphysics, but proceeds instead to sound a second common theme, that when seeking to know, human beings demand a special sort of account: knowledge seekers seek causal accounts which lay bare the real structure of the world,2 thereby making what is more intelligible by nature also more intelligible to us (Meta. 982a1-3; APo 89b23-31).3
