Aristotle is attributed to a moderate realistic position which largely coincides with conceptualism, but strictly speaking, it is a simplification and perhaps also an Aristotelic-Tomist interpretation of the original Aristotelian position.
They are key to understanding the central axis of Aristotelian philosophy, the notions of act and power that seek to explain movement as it becomes. Movement as a change in a reality requires three conditions that operate as principles: matter, form and deprivation. The change would be unintelligible if there was no change power in the object. Change is, in fact, the transition from a potential state to a current state. The passage from one state to the other is carried out through an efficient cause that can be 'external' (in art) or 'internal' (in the very nature of the object considered). Aristotle states that change is to carry out what exists potentially as it exists potentially. However, this potency cannot be any potency: a man is not potentially a cow, but a child is potentially a man, otherwise he would always be a child.
The word 'metaphysics' was the result of a spatial denomination that Andronicus of Rhodes made of Aristotle's work in the first century. This exclusively classifier designation later had a deeper meaning, because with the studies that are the object of the first philosophy it constitutes a knowledge that aspires to take on what is situated beyond or behind the physical being as such.
According to Aristotle, there is a science that studies being as being. This science deals with the first principles and the highest causes. It therefore deserves to be called 'philosophy first', unlike any 'philosophy second'. Thus, this' first philosophy 'deals with being as being, that is, its determinations, its principles. He also deals with something that is, in the order of what is and in the order also of his knowledge. But this higher or supreme being can be understood in two ways:
As a formal study (which will then be ontology.
As a study of the separate and motionless substance (the first engine) in which case it will be, as it calls Aristotle, theological philosophy.
Classification of Aristotelian work according to Andronicus of Rhodes