Book 11
7
And just as the mathematician makes a study of abstractions (for in his investigations he first abstracts everything that is sensible, such as weight and lightness, hardness and its contrary, and also heat and cold and all other sensible contrarieties, leaving only quantity and continuity—sometimes in one, sometimes in two and sometimes in three dimensions—and their affections qua quantitative and continuous, and does not study them with respect to any other thing; and in some cases investigates the relative positions of things and the properties of these, and in others their commensurability or incommensurability, and in others their ratios; yet nevertheless we hold that there is one and the same science of all these things, viz. geometry), so it is the same with regard to Being.
8
For the study of its attributes in so far as it is Being, and of its contrarietiesi.e., identity, otherness, etc. qua Being, belongs to no other science than Philosophy; for to physics one would assign the study of things not qua Being but qua participating in motion, while dialectics and sophistry deal with the attributes of existing things, but not of things qua Being, nor do they treat of Being itself in so far as it is Being.
9
Therefore it remains that the philosopher is the man who studies the things which we have described, in so far as they are Being. And since everything that is , although the term has several meanings, is so described in virtue of some one common concept, and the same is true of the contraries (since they can be referred to the primary contrarieties and differences of Being), and since things of this kind can fall under one science, the difficulty which we stated at the beginningAristot. Met. 11.1.1. may be regarded as solvedAlso the problem stated in ch. i. 3.—I mean the problem as to how there can be one science of several things which are different in genus.
