This book develops a new interpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics. By exploring the significance of the long ignored distinction between being with regard to categories and being with regard to potentiality and actuality, the author presents that Aristotle's science of being has two distinct aspects: an investigation of the basic constituents of reality in terms of categories, predication, and definition, and an investigation which deals with change, process, and order of the world.
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.
Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind is the first book to show how hylomorphism can be used to solve mind-body problems--persistent problems understanding how thought, feeling, perception, and other mental phenomena fit into the physical world described by our best science. Hylomorphism claims that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle. Some individuals, paradigmatically living things, consist of materials that are structured or organized in various ways. Those structures are responsible for individuals being the kinds of things they are, and having the kinds of powers or capacities they have. From a hylomorphic perspective, mind-body problems are byproducts of a worldview that rejects structure. Hylomorphic structure carves out distinctive individuals from the otherwise undifferentiated sea of matter and energy described by our best physics, and it confers on those individuals distinctive powers, including the powers to think, feel, and perceive. A worldview that rejects hylomorphic structure lacks a basic principle which distinguishes the parts of the physical universe that can think, feel, and perceive from those that can't, and without such a principle, the existence of those powers in the physical world can start to look inexplicable and mysterious. But if mental phenomena are structural phenomena, as hylomorphism claims, then they are uncontroversially part of the physical world, for on the hylomorphic view, structure is uncontroversially part of the physical world. Hylomorphism thus provides an elegant way of solving mind-body problems.
From its Presocratic beginnings, Western philosophy concerned itself with a quest for unity both in terms of the systematization of knowledge and as a metaphysical search for a unity of being—two trends that can be regarded as converging and culminating in Hegel's system of absolute idealism. Since Hegel, however, the philosophical quest for unity has become increasingly problematic. Jussi Backman returns to that question in this book, examining the place of the unity of being in the work of Heidegger. Backman sketches a consistent picture of Heidegger as a thinker of unity who throughout his career in different ways attempted to come to terms with both Parmenides's and Aristotle's fundamental questions concerning the singularity or multiplicity of being—attempting to do so, however, in a "postmetaphysical" manner rooted in rather than above and beyond particular, situated beings. Through his analysis, Backman offers a new way of understanding the basic continuity of Heidegger's philosophical project and the interconnectedness of such key Heideggerian concepts as ecstatic temporality, the ontological difference, the turn (Kehre), the event (Ereignis), the fourfold (Geviert), and the analysis of modern technology.
The main objective of this Element is to reconstruct Aristotle's view on the nature of ontological priority in the Categories. Over the last three decades, investigations into ontological dependence and priority have become a major concern in contemporary metaphysics. Many see Aristotle as the originator of these discussions and, as a consequence, there is considerable interest in his own account of ontological dependence. In light of the renewed interest in Aristotelian metaphysics, it will be worthwhile - both historically and systematically - to return to Aristotle himself and to see how he himself conceived of ontological priority (what he calls 'priority in substance' [proteron kata ousian] or 'priority in nature' [proteron tēi phusei]), which is to be understood as a form of asymmetric ontological dependence.
Throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, both in the analytic and continental traditions, metaphysics was deemed to be passé. The last few decades, however, have witnessed a remarkable growth of interest among analytic philosophers in various traditional metaphysical topics, such as modality, truth, causality, etc. which resulted in the emergence of various forms of analytic metaphysics. The new forms of metaphysics differ from its traditional forms mostly in their methodology (we may notice various applications of contemporary formal logical techniques) and in the range of proposed solutions to particular problems. Besides these and other differences, however, there are also many similarities and there are even some who intentionally develop traditional metaphysical themes using the contemporary analytical methods. All these developments call for detailed exploration, which is the general goal of the present publication Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. The publication is the fruit of the conference which took place in Prague in 2010 and which had for its aim to bring together those willing to explore relations between the traditional and contemporary concerns, both from among the leading analytic philosophers working in metaphysics and the historians of philosophy devoted to the study of the metaphysical tradition. The specific focus of the conference was a re-examination of topics such as categories, metaphysical structure, substance and accident, existence, modalities, and predication.
Metaphysics or Ontology? treats the evolution of the object of metaphysics from being, to the concept of being, to, finally, the object (thought). Possible being must be non-contradictory, but an object of thought includes anything a human being can think, including contradictions and nothingness. When the concept of being, or object of thought, replaces existence as the object of metaphysics, it becomes something other than metaphysics—ontology, or something beyond ontology. However, ontology cannot examine existence because it only investigates concepts and possibility. Only classical metaphysics investigates reality qua reality. This book masterfully treats the history of this controversy and many other important metaphysical questions raised over the centuries
The systematic comparison of Avicenna’s Ilāhiyyāt of the Šifā' with Aristotle’s Metaphysics, accomplished for the first time in the present volume, provides a detailed account of Avicenna’s reworking of the epistemological profile and contents of the Metaphysics and a comprehensive investigation of this latter’s transmission in pre-Avicennian Greek and Arabic philosophy.
This volume re-examines some of the major themes at the intersection of traditional and contemporary metaphysics. The book uses as a point of departure Francisco Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations published in 1597. Minimalist metaphysics in empiricist/pragmatist clothing have today become mainstream in analytic philosophy. Independently of this development, the progress of scholarship in ancient and medieval philosophy makes clear that traditional forms of metaphysics have affinities with some of the streams in contemporary analytic metaphysics. The book brings together leading contemporary metaphysicians to investigate the viability of a neo-Aristotelian metaphysics.
