Metaphysics in the West today is in a period of crisis. For one thing, increasing encounters with non-Western philosophies behoove us to ask what is essential about the discipline and whether the approaches that have been taken in the West over the centuries are the only valid ways for exploring metaphysical themes. For another, we are witnessing also a puzzling disagreement among metaphysics manuals about topics and methods to employ. Unsurprisingly, the question raised by analytic camps resounds now more than ever: Could a science that claims to be as loft and broad as metaphysics ever attain to any real knowledge? Such a scenario occasions the need to examine once again what metaphysics is. This paper seeks to re-discover an original conceptualization of this science in the West: that which Aristotle presents in the introductory chapters of the manual which posterity calls Metaphysics. In said treatise, Aristotle takes metaphysics to be the kind of knowledge possessed by the wise. As wisdom, it is the highest exercise of theory.