Aristotle's commitment to knowledge by experience gives rise to the question, "How do we distinguish philosophy from science?"In his work entitled Posterior Analytics, Aristotle addressed the concept of "episteme" by which term Aristotle referred to scientific understanding.
According to Aristotle, primary among philosophy's tasks is to discover certain principles that are more basic than others. Aristotle argued we have a faculty that gives insights into these fundamental and basic principles and he designated that faculty as "intellect" or "nous" which is the Greek term for "mind."
He argued that it is with this faculty of the mind, the intellect, that we grasp these first principles. Aristotle also argued that it is with this faculty that we gain a kind of insight into the explanation role of the fundamental status of principles by use of our experience and by using this faculty to give scientific explanations.
Aristotle attempted to map out the sciences. He isolated a subject area as a field of inquiry, such as botany or biology. In his metaphysics he addressed "substance", which was an important word for Aristotle, though the origin of the term is somewhat trivial and simply was used to refer to those books in his library which came after his works on physics, therefore "meta" physics or "after" physics.
The term metaphysics in Aristotle's work, however, came to refer to all of reality as opposed to individual dimensions of reality such as identity, continuity, logical form, time, space or matter.
