Lucas Camargo dos Santos

In the prologue to his commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Thomas Aquinas establishes that the common being is the subject or genus of the subject of metaphysics: one of the three considerations appropriate to the science called σοφία. But it is the one that takes precedence over the others according to the analytical path of thought (via resolutionis). It is in dealing with divine things that metaphysics reaches its goal or terminus. In this work, we hope to achieve some understanding of the scientific estatute of metaphysics, which, as wisdom (σοφία), seeks first principles and first causes (πρῶτα αἴτια καὶ τὰς ἀρχὰς). Indeed, not as something subsistent (οὐσια χωριστή), but as causes and principles of everything that belongs to the "genus" of the common being by predication. Therefore, when the metaphysician considers divine things as principles and causes of the being (esse) of his subject, everything he knows through the subject of his science denotes the dependence on the being (esse) itself of something that can only be said to be a being as being by supposing its separation (χωριστόν). It is precisely the possibility and the conditions of this dependence that we aim at.