Particular Forms Revisited

Abstract

Late in the 1950s, Peter Geach wrote that there was scarcely a sentence of Metaphysics Z that is not inconsistent, at least verbally, with some sentence that appears elsewhere in the book. Since then, interpreters have attempted to discern a consistent position, but have commonly conceded that there is no coherent doctrine that will accommodate all that Aristotle says. It is one of Michael Frede and Gunther Patzig's achievements* to offer a unitary interpretation of the whole book, leaving very little to be explained by the hypothesis of editorial intrusion. Their first volume contains introductory essays not only dealing with the structure of the argument but also setting out what they are happy to call the theory of Metaphysics Z. This Introduction is followed by a translation with a facing Greek text. They found that the readings that they wished to adopt for their translation diverged from those of Jaeger in 130 places, so that it became indispensable to print the text translated and defended in the Commentary. The convenience of readers would have been served even more if they had felt able to give some rudimentary critical apparatus, with no pretensions to completeness, in which at least those textual variants thought worthy of mention in the Commentary were listed. As it is, readers may still prefer to have Jaeger or Ross's Greek text to hand when they use this commentary. The translation is clearly intended to be used as an adjunct to the Commentary. Although they rightly remark that a good translation should not aim to iron out the roughnesses, obscurities and ambiguities of the original, the attempt to reproduce these features of Aristotle's text in German is at times overshadowed by the role of the translation in making clear exactly how they read the text. As an example, we may take their translation of 1033b7f: