#universal science

Main article: Metaphysics (Aristotle)

Aristotle's Metaphysics was divided into three parts, which are now regarded as the proper branches of traditional Western metaphysics:

Ontology: The study of being and existence; includes the definition and classification of entities, physical or mental, the nature of their properties, and the nature of change.

Natural Theology: The study of a God or Gods; involves many topics, including among others the nature of religion and the world, existence of the divine, questions about Creation, and the numerous religious or spiritual issues that concern humankind in general.

Universal science:The study of first principles, such as the law of noncontradiction (logic), which Aristotle believed were the foundation of all other inquiries.

Universal science or first philosophy treats of "being qua being"—that is, what is basic to all science before one adds the particular details of any one science.

Essentially "being qua being" may be translated as "being insofar as being goes" or as "being in terms of being."

This includes topics such as causality, substance, species and elements, as well as the notions of relation, interaction, and finitude.

A further point to be taken into consideration here is that philosophy, having grown out of a critical attitude to each and every traditional predisposition, is limited in its spread by no national boundaries. All that must be present is the capacity for a universal critical attitude, which too, of course, presupposes a certain level of prescientific culture. Thus can the upheaval in the national culture propagate itself, first of all because the progressing universal science becomes a common possession of nations that were at first strangers to each other, and then because a unified community, both scientific and educational, extends to the majority of nations.

Spiritually Europe has a birthplace. By this I do not mean a geographical place, in some one land, though this too is true. I refer, rather, to a spiritual birthplace in a nation or in certain men or groups of men belonging to this nation. It is the ancient Greek nation* in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. In it there grows up a new kind of attitude of individuals toward their environing world. Consequent upon this emerges a completely new type of spiritual structure, rapidly growing into a systematically rounded (geschlossen) cultural form that the Greeks called philosophy. Correctly translated, in its original sense, this bespeaks nothing but universal science, science of the world as a whole, of the universal unity of all being. Very soon the interest in the totality and, by the same token, the question regarding the all-embracing becoming and the resulting being begin to particularize themselves in accord with the general forms and regions of being. Thus philosophy, the one science, is ramified into the various particular sciences.

In the emergence of philosophy in this sense, a sense, that is, which includes all sciences, I see - no matter how paradoxical this may seem - the original phenomenon of spiritual Europe. The elucidations that follow, however brief they must be kept, will soon eliminate the seeming paradox.

EDMUND HUSSERL: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man