Substance in Aristotle's Metaphysics Zeta

Substance in Aristotle's Metaphysics Zeta

Author: Norman O. Dahl

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-08-28

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 303022161X

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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. .


Aristotle’s "Metaphysics" Lambda – New Essays

Aristotle’s

Author: Christoph Horn

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2016-06-06

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1501503448

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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.


The Sense of the Past

The Sense of the Past

Author: Bernard Williams

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-02-09

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1400827108

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Before his death in 2003, Bernard Williams planned to publish a collection of historical essays, focusing primarily on the ancient world. This posthumous volume brings together a much wider selection, written over some forty years. His legacy lives on in this masterful work, the first collection ever published of Williams's essays on the history of philosophy. The subjects range from the sixth century B.C. to the twentieth A.D., from Homer to Wittgenstein by way of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Sidgwick, Collingwood, and Nietzsche. Often one would be hard put to say which part is history, which philosophy. Both are involved throughout, because this is the history of philosophy written philosophically. Historical exposition goes hand in hand with philosophical scrutiny. Insights into the past counteract blind acceptance of present assumptions. In his touching and illuminating introduction, Myles Burnyeat writes of these essays: "They show a depth of commitment to the history of philosophy seldom to be found nowadays in a thinker so prominent on the contemporary philosophical scene." The result celebrates the interest and importance to philosophy today of its near and distant past. The Sense of the Past is one of three collections of essays by Bernard Williams published by Princeton University Press since his death. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, selected, edited, and with an introduction by Geoffrey Hawthorn, and Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, selected, edited, and with an introduction by A. W. Moore, make up the trio.


How Aristotle gets by in Metaphysics Zeta

How Aristotle gets by in Metaphysics Zeta

Author: Frank A. Lewis

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-06-27

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0191640646

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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.


A Companion to Aristotle

A Companion to Aristotle

Author: Georgios Anagnostopoulos

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 674

ISBN-13: 1118610636

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The Blackwell Companion to Aristotle provides in-depth studies of the main themes of Aristotle's thought, from art to zoology. The most comprehensive single volume survey of the life and work of Aristotle Comprised of 40 newly commissioned essays from leading experts Coves the full range of Aristotle's work, from his 'theoretical' inquiries into metaphysics, physics, psychology, and biology, to the practical and productive "sciences" such as ethics, politics, rhetoric, and art


The Metaphysics of Relations

The Metaphysics of Relations

Author: Anna Marmodoro

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0198735871

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This volume presents thirteen original essays which explore both traditional and contemporary aspects of the metaphysics of relations. It is uncontroversial that there are true relational predications-'Abelard loves Eloise', 'Simmias is taller than Socrates', 'smoking causes cancer', and so forth. More controversial is whether any true relational predications have irreducibly relational truthmakers. Do any of the statements above involve their subjects jointly instantiating polyadic properties, or can we explain their truths solely in terms of monadic, non-relational properties of the relata? According to a tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle, and continued by medieval philosophers, polyadic properties are metaphysically dubious. In non-symmetric relations such as the amatory relation, a property would have to inhere in two things at once-lover and beloved-but characterise each differently, and this puzzled the ancients. More recent work on non-symmetric relations highlights difficulties with their directionality. Such problems offer clear motivation for attempting to reduce relations to monadic properties. By contrast, ontic structural realists hold that the nature of physical reality is exhausted by the relational structure expressed in the equations of fundamental physics. On this view, there must be some irreducible relations, for its fundamental ontology is purely relational. The Metaphysics of Relations draws together the work of a team of leading metaphysicians, to address topics as diverse as ancient and medieval reasons for scepticism about polyadic properties; recent attempts to reduce causal and spatiotemporal relations; recent work on the directionality of relational properties; powers ontologies and their associated problems; whether the most promising interpretations of quantum mechanics posit a fundamentally relational world; and whether the very idea of such a world is coherent. From those who question whether there are relational properties at all, to those who hold they are a fundamental part of reality, this book covers a broad spectrum of positions on the nature and ontological status of relations, from antiquity to the present day.


The Basic Works of Aristotle

The Basic Works of Aristotle

Author: Aristotle

Publisher: Modern Library

Published: 2009-08-19

Total Pages: 1438

ISBN-13: 0307417522

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Edited by Richard McKeon, with an introduction by C.D.C. Reeve Preserved by Arabic mathematicians and canonized by Christian scholars, Aristotle’s works have shaped Western thought, science, and religion for nearly two thousand years. Richard McKeon’s The Basic Works of Aristotle—constituted out of the definitive Oxford translation and in print as a Random House hardcover for sixty years—has long been considered the best available one-volume Aristotle. Appearing in ebook at long last, this edition includes selections from the Organon, On the Heavens, The Short Physical Treatises, Rhetoric, among others, and On the Soul, On Generation and Corruption, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Poetics in their entirety.


Aesthetic Concepts

Aesthetic Concepts

Author: Emily Brady

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9780198241010

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Aesthetic Concepts is an exploration of key topics in contemporary aesthetics that arise from the seminal work of Frank Sibley (1923-1996). Sibley developed a distinctive aesthetic theory through a number of papers published between 1955 and 1995 (a selection of which, entitled Approach toAesthetics, is also published by OUP). Sibley's theory is grounded in the important and influential distinction he made between aesthetic and non-aesthetic concepts in his ground-breaking paper, 'Aesthetic Concepts'. Thirteen specially written essays by British and American philosophical aestheticians bring Sibley's insight into a contemporary framework, exploring the ways his ideas give rise to important new discussion about issues in aesthetics that greatly interested him. These include: the differences andrelationships between aesthetic concepts and other types of concepts, aesthetic realism and objectivity, methods of aesthetic evaluation in practice and in theory, the boundaries of aesthetics, and aesthetics of nature versus aesthetics of art. This collection will be of interest to scholars inphilosophy, art theory, and art criticism.


Aristotle on Substance

Aristotle on Substance

Author: Mary Louise Gill

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780691020709

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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.