The Metaphysics

The Metaphysics
Author: Aristotle
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2004-05-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0141912014

The Metaphysics presents Aristotle's mature rejection of both the Platonic theory that what we perceive is just a pale reflection of reality and the hardheaded view that all processes are ultimately material. He argued instead that the reality or substance of things lies in their concrete forms, and in so doing he probed some of the deepest questions of philosophy: What is existence? How is change possible? And are there certain things that must exist for anything else to exist at all? The seminal notions discussed in The Metaphysics - of 'substance' and associated concepts of matter and form, essence and accident, potentiality and actuality - have had a profound and enduring influence, and laid the foundations for one of the central branches of Western philosophy.

Aristotle's Theory of Substance

Aristotle's Theory of Substance
Author: Michael Vernon Wedin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2002
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199253080

Aristotle's views on the fundamental nature of reality are usually taken to be inconsistent. Two sources for these views are Categories and the central books of Metaphysics. This text argues that he is engaged in different projects in these books.

Aristotle Metaphysics

Aristotle Metaphysics
Author: Aristotle
Publisher:
Total Pages: 301
Release:
Genre: Metaphysics
ISBN:

Presents the full text of "Metaphysics," by Aristotle, presented by the Perseus Project of the Department of Classics at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Includes author information and help for texts and text tools. Offers Greek text with morphological links. Links to the home page of the Perseus Project.

Substance in Aristotle's Metaphysics Zeta

Substance in Aristotle's Metaphysics Zeta
Author: Norman O. Dahl
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2019-08-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 303022161X

This book argues that according to Metaphysics Zeta, substantial forms constitute substantial being in the sensible world, and individual composites make up the basic constituents that possess this kind of being. The study explains why Aristotle provides a reexamination of substance after the Categories, Physics, and De Anima, and highlights the contribution Z is meant to make to the science of being. Norman O. Dahl argues that Z.1-11 leaves both substantial forms and individual composites as candidates for basic constituents, with Z.12 being something that can be set aside. He explains that although the main focus of Z.13-16 is to argue against a Platonic view that takes universals to be basic constituents, some of its arguments commit Aristotle to individual composites as basic constituents, with Z.17’s taking substantial form to constitute substantial being is compatible with that commitment. .

How Aristotle gets by in Metaphysics Zeta

How Aristotle gets by in Metaphysics Zeta
Author: Frank A. Lewis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2013-06-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191640646

Frank A. Lewis presents a closely argued exposition of Metaphysics Zeta—one of Aristotle's most dense and controversial texts. It is commonly understood to contain Aristotle's deepest thoughts on the definition of substance and surrounding metaphysical issues. But people have increasingly come to recognize how little Aristotle says in Zeta about his own theory of (Aristotelian) form and matter. Instead, he spends the bulk of the book examining 'received opinions', often as filtered through his own Organon, but including above all the views of Plato, who is at times friend, and at times foe. For much of the time, we are left to reconstruct Aristotle's finished views, subject to the constraint that they survive the critique he directs in Zeta at the philosophical tradition. In this book, Lewis argues that in giving his actual conclusion to Zeta in its final chapter, 17, Aristotle drops his earlier, largely critical engagement with received views, and turns approvingly to his own Posterior Analytics. The result is a causal view of (primary) substance, representing the property of being a (primary) substance (or the substance of a thing) as, in modern dress, the second-order functional property of (Aristotelian) forms, that they be the cause of being for different compound material substances. The property of being the cause of being for a thing is a role property, and it is realized in different forms and the sets of causal powers associated with them, matching the variety of things that have a form as their substance. Meanwhile, the failure of previous attempts at definition in earlier chapters leaves Aristotle's own definition standing as the 'best explanation' for the views proprietary to the theory of form and matter. The point that (Aristotelian) forms are the primary substances is not the main conclusion to Zeta, but rather a result his definition must give, if the definition is to be acceptable.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics
Author: Aristotle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199682984

Laura Castelli presents a new translation of the tenth book (Iota) of Aristotle's Metaphysics, together with a comprehensive commentary. Castelli's commentary helps readers to understand Aristotle's most systematic account of what it is for something to be one, what it is for something to be a unit of measurement, and what contraries are.

Doing and Being

Doing and Being
Author: Jonathan Beere
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2009-10-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199206708

Doing and Being confronts the problem of how to understand two central concepts of Aristotle's philosophy: energeia and dunamis. While these terms seem ambiguous between actuality/potentiality and activity/capacity, Aristotle did not intend them to be so. Through a careful and detailed reading of Metaphysics Theta, Beere argues that we can solve the problem by rejecting both "actuality" and "activity" as translations of energeia, and by working out an analogical conception of energeia. This approach enables Beere to discern a hitherto unnoticed connection between Plato's Sophist and Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta, and to give satisfying interpretations of the major claims that Aristotle makes in Metaphysics Theta, the claim that energeia is prior in being to capacity (Theta 8) and the claim that any eternal principle must be perfectly good (Theta 9).

Aristotle’s "Metaphysics" Lambda – New Essays

Aristotle’s
Author: Christoph Horn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2016-06-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501503448

The treatise known as book Lambda of Aristotle’s Metaphysics has become one of the most debated issues of recent scholarship. Aristotle adresses here fundamental questions of his theory of substance, his idea of causes and principles, and his concept of motions. Furthermore, the importance of the text is due to the fact that it contains an outline of what was traditionally understood as Aristotle’s theology.