Thinking books · Foundations & philosophy · Aristotle, c. 340 BC

Metaphysics — the big ideas

An attempt to say what exists and what counts as an explanation of it.

Free — no account needed to read

The big ideas

It distinguishes four different things people mean by "cause" — what it is made of, its form, what brought it about, and what it is for. Most arguments about causes are people answering different ones.

It insists that explanation has to stop somewhere: you cannot explain everything by something else forever. Naming where your explanation bottoms out is part of giving one.

The demand for first principles — the things you reason from rather than to — is where "first-principles thinking" actually comes from.

Practise it — no need to have read it

Take something that went wrong recently. Write four different answers to "what caused it": what it was made of, its shape, what set it off, and what it was for.

A hint: Notice which one you normally reach for, and which one you never do.

Where it shows up in real life

• Root-cause work
• Arguments where both sides are right about different causes
• Designing anything from scratch

This book is old enough to be freely available in most countries.

Described in our own words with the source named — never quoted, and not a substitute for reading the book.