Antiquity

Jean Grondin: "Although they never practiced metaphysics in the modern sense of the term, Plato and Aristotle nevertheless embody the summits of metaphysical thought. The term "metaphysics" did not appear until the twelfth century. Although the Greek philosophers spoke of the Ideas, of the Good, of Being as Being, and of the Prime Mover, their intention was not to inaugurate a new discipline. They simply pursued the idea that human thought must seek its ultimate principles. But in doing so, they invented the vocabulary of metaphysics. They defined its object (the archè, the prôton, the eidos, the Supreme Good, Being as Being), determined its universal scope ("katholou"), pursued its fundamental impulse (the epekeina, the hypothesis, the meta), and discovered the realm of thought (reason, the pure act, the thought of thought).

All subsequent “metaphysics” has been the work of epigones—a fact recognized more often than not. The division between platonici and aristotelici, separating thinkers who identify with the idealism of Plato’s dialogues from those that identify with Aristotle’s analytic realism, lasted through the Middle Ages, and continues even up to the present day.

One could say that School metaphysics is to the Platonic-Aristotelian inauguration of metaphysics what a literature department is to poetry. That is, a didactic attempt to understand, and even systematize, the creative impulse that precedes it but which it can never equal. Following Plato and Aristotle, the academic divisions of philosophy proliferated, Xenocrates probably being its primary instigator. Philosophy was broken up into hermetically segregated, and less creative “schools” (Skepticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism) in which metaphysical thought was absent. ....The most important and most original revival of metaphysical thought in Antiquity appears in the thought of Plotinus."

Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Metaphysics (p. 68). Columbia University Press. 2004