David Bronstein sheds new light on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics--one of the most important, and difficult, works in the history of western philosophy--by arguing that it is coherently structured around two themes of enduring philosophical interest: knowledge and learning. He argues that the Posterior Analytics is a sustained examination of scientific knowledge, an elegantly organized work in which Aristotle describes the mind's ascent from sense-perception of particulars to scientific knowledge of first principles. Bronstein goes on to highlight Plato's influence on Aristotle's (...) text, and argues against current orthodoxy that Aristotle is committed to the Socratic Picture of inquiry, according to which one should seek what a thing's essence is before seeking its demonstrable attributes and their causes. (shrink)

David Charles presents a major new study of Aristotle's views on meaning, essence, necessity, and related topics. These interconnected views are central to Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, and are also highly relevant to current philosophical debates. Charles aims to reach a clear understanding of Aristotle's claims and arguments, to assess their truth, and to evaluate their importance to ancient and modern philosophy.

Michail Peramatzis presents a new interpretation of Aristotle's view of the priority relations between fundamental and derivative parts of reality, following ...

Michael Wedin argues against the prevailing notion that Aristotle's views on the nature of reality are fundamentally inconsistent. According to Wedin's new interpretation, the difference between the early theory of the Categories and the later theory of the Metaphysics reflects the fact that Aristotle is engaged in quite different projects in the two works--the earlier focusing on ontology, and the later on explanation.

This book takes up the central themes of Aristotle's metaphysical theory and the various transformations they undergo prior to their full expression in the Metaphysics. Aristotle's metaphysics is bedevilled by classic puzzles involving such notions as form, predication, universal, and substance, which result from his attempt to adapt the various requirements on primary substance developed in his earlier works so that they fit the very different metaphysical picture in his later work. Professor Lewis argues that Aristotle is himself aware of (...) most if not all of these difficulties and in the Metaphysics works hard to ensure the coherence of his theory. He presents Aristotle's views as a formal theory complete with axioms, definitions, and theorems. (shrink)

This book is a re-thinking of Aristotle's metaphysical theory of material substances. The view of the author is that the 'substances' are the living things, the organisms: chiefly, the animals. There are three main parts to the book: Part I, a treatment of the concepts of substance and nonsubstance in Aristotle's Categories; Part III, which discusses some important features of biological objects as Aristotelian substances, as analysed in Aristotle's biological treatises and the de Anima; and Part V, which attempts to (...) relate the conception of substance as interpreted so far to that of the Metaphysics itself. The main aim of the study is to recreate in modern imagination a vivid, intuitive understanding of Aristotle's concept of material substance: a certain distinctive concept of what an individual material object is. (shrink)

Review of Primary Ousia: An Essay on Aristotle's Metaphysics Z and H, by Michael J. Loux (Cornell University Press: 1991).

Frank A. Lewis presents a close study of book Zeta of Aristotle's Metaphysics, one of his most dense and controversial texts, commonly understood to contain his deepest thoughts on the definition of substance and related metaphysical issues. Lewis argues that Aristotle returns to the causal view of primary substance from his Posterior Analytics.

This book explores a fundamental tension in Aristotle's metaphysics: how can an entity such as a living organisma composite generated through the imposition of form on preexisting matterhave the conceptual unity that Aristotle demands of primary substances? Mary Louise Gill bases her treatment of the problem of unity, and of Aristotle's solution, on a fresh interpretation of the relation between matter and form. Challenging the traditional understanding of Aristotelian matter, she argues that material substances are subverted by matter and maintained (...) by form that controls the matter to serve a positive end. The unity of material substances thus involves a dynamic relation between resistant materials and directive ends. Aristotle on Substance offers both a general account of matter, form, and substantial unity and a specific assessment of particular Aristotelian arguments. At every point, Gill engages Aristotle on his own philosophical ground through the detailed analysis of central, and often controversial, texts from the Metaphysics, Physics, On Generation and Corruption, De Anima, De Caelo, and the biological works. The result is a coherent, firmly grounded rethinking of Aristotle's central metaphysical concepts and of his struggle toward a fully consistent theory of material substances. (shrink)

J. L. Ackrill; VIII*—Aristotle's Definitions of Psuche, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 73, Issue 1, 1 June 1973, Pages 119–134, https://doi.org.

Aristotle's solution to the problem raised in Ch. 4 depends on his account of how we arrive at thoughts on the basis of experience. In his view, we standardly acquire a term for a kind on the basis of contact with members of a kind, without thereby knowing that the kind in question exists. Further, we can grasp such terms without knowing that the kind has a unifying basic feature that explains its necessary properties. Our understanding of the kind is (...) to be compared with that of a craftsman and not that of a proto‐scientist. Aristotle's view is distinguished from several twentieth‐century accounts of these issues. (shrink)

J. L. Ackrill; VIII*—Aristotle's Definitions of Psuche, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 73, Issue 1, 1 June 1973, Pages 119–134, https://doi.org.

John Ackrill argued that Aristotelian bodies are conceptually promiscuous, since they fail to exemplify the modal relations that are expected to hold between their matter and their form. Although “potentially alive”, organic bodies are bound to be ensouled, on pain of lacking the required potential; but to the extent that they are ensouled, they are already actually alive. It seems odd to claim that a body may lack what it cannot help having. This paper claims that the standard solution falls (...) short of the strong unity living beings display, given that nothing in them can be accidentally alive. An alternative proposal is advanced, based on two distinctions Aristotle draws in his philosophical lexicon: both matter and form have a claim to being called “nature”; formal nature may be found in its subject either in actuality or in potentiality. It is argued that the characterization of organic bodies as “potentially alive” conforms to, a pattern that helps explain the specific way in which bodies share in the organisms’ life. Two possible instances of are finally considered by way of illustration. (shrink)

Vers la fin de Métaphysique Z 17, Aristote essaie de mettre en lumière le rapport hylémorphique qu’il veut soutenir pour les substances sensibles à l’aide de l’exemple des syllabes : la syllabe BA ne peut être comprise ni comme la juxtapostion des lettres A et B, ni comme le produit de ces lettres et de l’ajout d’un troisième élément, car le problème de son unité se poserait à nouveau, en sorte qu’elle suppose quelque chose d’autre, la forme, grâce à laquelle (...) la syllabe acquiert son unité. Dans cet article, j’examine le rôle de cet exemple dans Z 17 par rapport à la première partie de ce chapitre (dans laquelle Aristote établit la manière correcte de formuler la question « pourquoi »), tout en essayant de replacer Z 17 dans le cadre de l’ensemble de l’enquête sur la substance menée tout au long du livre Z de la Métaphysique. (shrink)