Book IV of Aristotle’s Metaphysics opens with the proposal of a science of “being as being”, which he sets beside the “special sciences” and the mathematical sciences. The treatise gave the discipline the name it still bears, and the sentence is commonly read as its programme. It stands under this term as the place where the phrase itself is introduced.
Read in contextThere is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences; for none of these others treats universally of being as being. They cut off a part of being and investigate the attribute of this part; this is what the mathematical sciences for instance do.