It examines the relationship between mind and matter, between substances, or the individual “things” in the world, and their attributes, or characteristics. It tries to answer questions about how things are and about how things change to become something else. Metaphysics is concerned with questions about the fundamental nature of existence, being, and the world. Aristotle calls metaphysics “first philosophy”, and says that it deals with “first causes” and the “principles of things,” the rejection of what the Christian philosophers called esse ipsum subsistens.Metaphysics is one of the main branches of philosophy, along with ethics, aesthetics, logic, epistemology, and others. The impossibility of this interpretation results from Aristotle's rejection of an essence and a substance of being (Metaph. with the unmovable mover, as some interpreters pretend, because this latter has only an ontological, not a logical, priority in respect to the world. This ‘focal meaning’ cannot be identified with primary substance, i.e. ‘focal meaning’, which coincides with substance (Metaph.Γ2), and substance has not only an ontological priority, but also a logical priority, in respect to the other beings, as was shown by G. But ‘being’ for Aristotle has also a unity, i.e. Aristotle develops an argument in favour of this last thesis, observing that ‘being’ and ‘one’ cannot be a single genus, because they are predicated of their differences (Metaph. But some analytical philosophers, inspired by Aristotle, maintain that ‘being’ has many senses (Austin, Ryle). the thesis that these terms have only one meaning (see Russell, White, Quine, van Inwagen). In analytic philosophy, so-called ‘univocalism’ is the prevailing interpretation of the meaning of terms such as ‘being’ or ‘existence’, i.e.
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