Aristotle  ’s question was, to be sure, a “metaphysical” question. Whatever the post-Aristotelian origin of this word in the libraries of Rhodes, clearly the question about beings as beings was a “passing beyond” beings to that which makes them be, their “being-ness” (οὐσία   [ousia]). Hence even if Aristotle called such an interrogation “first philosophy,” we see with what justice may be attributed to the word “metaphysics” itself an interpretation   that has become common currency since Simplicius in the fifth century: a “going beyond” (μετὰ [meta]) the “physical” (τὰ φυσικά   [ta physika]). This “going beyond” the Latins would call transcendere, so that metaphysics always comports in one way or another the process of transcendence [Transzendenz  ]. The φυσικά must be understood as τὰ φύσει ὄντα   [ta physei onta] (beings which “are” by reason of φύσις [physis]), where φύσις must not   be taken to mean what we would call “physical” nature but must be understood in the sense that this word had for the pre-Socratic thinkers, as that by which all things emerge into presence as what they are, sc. Being itself. Briefly: metaphysics means the transcendence of beings to their Being in such a way that beings are thereby considered as beings. [RHPT:4-5]