[MD] Metaphysics

[X Acto]

The word ‘metaphysics’ is notoriously hard to define. 
Twentieth-century coinages like ‘meta-language’ and 
‘metaphilosophy’ encourage the impression that metaphysics 
is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study 
devoted to matters that transcend the mundane concerns of 
Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken. 
The word ‘metaphysics’ is derived from a collective title of 
the fourteen books by Aristotle that we currently think of 
as making up “Aristotle's Metaphysics.” Aristotle himself did 
not know the word. (He had four names for the branch of 
philosophy that is the subject-matter of Metaphysics: 
‘first philosophy’, ‘first science’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘theology’.)
 At least one hundred years after Aristotle's death, 
an editor of his works (in all probability, Andronicus of Rhodes) 
entitled those fourteen books “Ta meta ta phusika”—“the after the 
physicals” or “the ones after the physical ones”—, the “physical 
ones” being the books contained in what we now call 
Aristotle's Physics. 

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/