In this publication, readers with only a somewhat limited philosophical background will encounter a wonderful and clear introduction to the metaphysics of Aristotle and St. Thomas, while supporters of personalism will become familiar with Burgos’s interesting and original proposal (which is nevertheless deeply rooted in the tradition associated with this current of thought). At the same time, critically minded readers will be able to familiarize themselves with the author’s lucidly presented arguments and reflect on their strength and plausibility. To sum up, it can be said that this is a book worth recommending to a wide audience.

Abstract The first Latin translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics of which we know was made only in the mid-12th century, by James of Venice († after 1148), and is transmitted for books I–IV, 4 (1007a31). James' Greek model, which came not down to us, was older than most of the c. 50 Greek manuscripts containing the Metaphysics and can be reconstructed through the Latin translation itself, carried out verbum de verbo. The present article aims to precisely identify the position of James' Greek model in the tradition, i.e. the stemma codicum of Dieter Harlfinger from 1979. As the collation against the independent Greek tradition reveals, the Translatio Iacobi happens to be the oldest tangible member of the δ-family and part of a special, southern Italian branch of the transmission that seems to have been the prevailing text version of the Metaphysics in the Terra d’Otranto from the 13th to the 15th century.

Abstract The aim of this article is to break down to its principal arguments the abundant material recently published in Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe related to a conference given in December 1932 on the principle of noncontradiction (PNC). I will first highlight the importance in phenomenology of a correct interpretation of the PNC and then explain Heidegger's general strategy toward logical principles during the 1920s. After showing that Heidegger's 1932 interpretation of the PNC still pertains to Being and Time's fundamental ontology, I will present Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's Metaphysics Γ 3 and 4 that is the center of the conference. I will conclude by showing how the ontological significance of the PNC makes sense in the fundamental‐ontological context in which the understanding‐of‐being serves as the condition of possibility of our encounter with entities.

ABSTRACT This is the first English translation of Ibn Sīnā's (Avicenna) Commentary on Chapters 6-10 of Aristotle's Metaphysics Λ. It is significant as it is one of only a small number of surviving commentaries by Ibn Sīnā and offers crucial insights into not only his attitudes towards his predecessors, but also his own philosophical positions — especially with regard to the human intellect's connections to God and the cosmos — and his attempt to develop a distinctive mode of commentary.

The article offers a new reconstruction of Aristotle's metaphysics, showing what place metaphysics occupies in the Aristotelian system of scientific knowledge, what its subject matter is, and into what parts it naturally divides. The author discusses in detail the Aristotelian doctrine of categories; his theory of essence; the doctrine of potential and actual being; explanatory model of four causes and the doctrine of the divine Intellect, in which metaphysics meets theology. In expounding the Aristotelian doctrine of essence, the author challenges the traditional view that the theory of essence in the Categories, where concrete things are recognized as essences in the strict and proper sense of the word, is radically different from the theory of essence in Metaphysics VII (Z), where essence is identified with form. The author shows that in both treatises Aristotle regards essence as identical with the concrete thing, but only in so far as it is taken without its accidental properties and reduced solely to the substantive ones.

In the seventh chapter, Werner Jaeger examines the history of the creation of Aristotle's Metaphysics. The author insists that Metaphysics is not the only work that the author created in the last years of his life and did not have time to finish. He proclaims that Metaphysics is a collection of texts from different years, different periods of Aristotle’s life, united by editors according to content. That is, Metaphysics consists of certain layers that can be distributed according to chronology and the philosophical position expressed in them. The author provides careful textual and content analysis to support his claim. He suggests that Aristotle himself may have used his early notes in the late period and included them in the corpus of his later lectures on Metaphysics. At the same time, the corpus of modern Metaphysics contains parts that do not at all belong to Aristotle himself.

Chair of Culture Theory, Faculty of Management of Visual Culture, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw S ince antiquity, philosophers have wanted to know what the world is made of. But they have also wondered what sets it in motion. Where does this force that effects change, overcomes inertia, and leads to development come from, and how does it operate? Is it inherent in all matter? Does it stem from the way matter is constituted? Or maybe it is external and timeless, preceding and simultaneously shaping all that is material? This force had the power to transform disorder and chaos into a structured order that was at least partially comprehensible. The story of how the universe was born also merits careful consideration of the nature of the energy precipitating its birth. What triggered this eruption of energy? Was that process random or, on the contrary, marked by purposefulness even before it all began? Is it possible to find and use this primordial energy? Is it present in our everyday lives? What is left of it? What (or maybe who?) is or was it? Who or what was its source? The concept of energy is one of the central topics raised in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Energy (ενέργεια) is the vitality, activity, and force thanks to which a being turns from potential to actual. This would make it something formal in nature. Energy could be described as the force thanks to which potentiality, which is contained in primordial matter, starts the process of its actualization, which is accomplished in the process of its achieving form. According to Aristotle, this is because the proper object of study is intrinsic being, which he calls substantial being, whose structure is always composed of matter and form, or hylomorphic. Here, form means the conceptual component of a thing: it refers to those properties of substance that can be defined. As such, it is the essence of a thing, its actuality and reality. It could be said that it is thanks to form that we can say that a pot is a pot, a tree is a tree, and a human is a human. The specifics, in turn, are determined by matter, which contains individual differences that determine that a specific human is me, and not someone else. We can talk about two meanings of "matter": one is narrower and refers to what a specific thing is simply made of (wood, gold, stone), whereas the other pertains to what is not a concrete thing, nor a quantity, nor any category that determines and defines being. We cannot cognize matter in this primary sense, because it has no concept -it is pure potentiality, undifferentiated possibility. Its individual substances are only extracted from it by the energy of form, and they are what we can cognize. Since activity is the nature of form, Aristotle argues that activity, or energy, is the essence of being. The world is described as the continuous motion from the potential to the actual. This transition takes place within the order of four causes: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause. Each of them can be described using the concept of energy, which is the driving force behind the mechanism of all emerging, doing, creating, and acting. To gain a better grasp of this order, we could use the metaphor of a house in which the material cause is formed by bricks, concrete, wood, and so on, the formal cause by the design made by an architect, the efficient cause by the builders who will build the house based on the design, and the final cause by the purpose it was built to serve, which here means the desire to have a place to live. Changes taking place in the world are based on the transition from the potential to the actual. This transition is driven by energy, which following Aristotle we can call an "act." The process initiated by energy culminates in the full actualization of potentiality, or entelechy (εντελέχεια). If energy is

The article is dedicated to an unexplored subject in the history of spiritualism in the 19th century and considers two of its prominent representatives – the famous French spiritualist Felix Ravaisson (1813–1900) and the Swiss thinker Charles Secrétan (1815–1895). The author uses not only biographical material, but also such unstudied documents as Secretan’s article on the philosophy of Ravaisson and his letter to him, accidentally discovered by Ch. Devivaise in Ch. Renouvier’s archive. The author shows that the dependence of both philosophers on Schelling was not so much the direct influence of the German philosopher on their thought as an internal relationship with his thought. The article shows that Ravaisson’s emphasis on the aesthetic component of understanding the world as the self-development of the spirit contrasts with the moral optics of Secrétan’s metaphysics. In addition, the philosophy of Ravaisson was formed on the basis of the Christianly rethought metaphysics of Aristotle, while the philosophy of Secrétan has as its starting point the moral and religious thought of Kant. However, the pathos of the universal striving for the best, the highest, the excellent on the path of sacrificial service and self-giving indissolubly unites these spiritualist philosophers. In the Appendix to the article, the author gives a translation of the mentioned letter of Secrétan to Ravaisson.

Аристотеловата Метафизика в български превод

The "Existence of Life" to some extent implies the "soul", but the concept of the "soul" cannot fully encompass all the meanings of "existence of life" in Aristotle's philosophy, as it holds a broader connotation in his works. The paper first examines the understanding of the soul and life from the time of Homer to Plato and establishes the conditions for the existence of life in Aristotle's sense. It then elucidates the notion of "existence of life" from three dimensions: biology, physics, and politics, encompassing plants, animals, humans, and celestial bodies as various forms of "existence of life". Notably, "human" denotes not only a biological life form but also a political entity. This comprehensive perspective sheds profound insights on Aristotle's metaphysics, biology, political science, and ethics.

The notion of utility gained a strong foothold in health economics over the last decades. However, the concept of health utility has not yet been decisively or irrefutably defined and the definitions that exist often do not take into account the current state of psychological literature. This perspective paper shows that the current definition of health utility emphasizes decision-making processes, deploys personal preferences, assumes psychological egoism, and attempts to objectively and cardinally measure utility. However, these foundational axioms that underly the current definition of health utility are not necessarily in concurrence with the current state of psychological literature. Due to these perceived shortcomings of the current health utility definition, it may be beneficial to redefine the concept of health utility in accordance with the current state of psychological literature. In order to develop such a revised definition of health utility the commonly deployed formula (Eidos = Genos + Diaphora) originating from Aristotle's metaphysics is applied. The revised definition of health utility proposed in this perspective paper alludes to health utility as 'the subjective value, expressed in terms of perceived pain or pleasure, that is attributed to the cognitive, affective and conative experience of one's own physical, mental and social health state, which is determined through self-reflection and interaction with significant others'. Although this revised definition does neither replace nor supersede other conceptualizations of health utility, it may serve as a refreshing avenue for further discussion and could, eventually, support policymakers and health economists in operationalizing and measuring health utility in an even more accurate and veracious manner.

This collective volume sustains handsomely through its pages a difficult dual task: first, it presents a range of varied cases illustrating the manifold and complex, even often exceedingly subtle, questions raised by the use of images in science. Second, it manages to sustain, almost as an ebb and flow, a degree of epistemological reflection based on the particular studies. There are valuable cross-references between chapters, resulting in a powerful total effect on the reader, with the running question, emerging here and there but always implicit, of whether knowledge derives solely from visual perception. In case there were any doubts about the relevance of this theme, we should remember that this is precisely the opening discussion of Aristotle's Metaphysics: how all humans are drawn towards knowing, especially knowing through the eyes. 1

New Books across the Disciplines

Reviewed by: A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If by Marie-Laure Ryan Edward Wells (bio) Marie-Laure Ryan, A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If, The Ohio State University Press, 2022, ISBN: 978-0-8142-1508-1, 226 pages, $89.95 A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If is a scholarly work on a storyworld-based theory of narratology. However, its strengths lie beyond the scope arguing the merits of such a theory. They include its thorough address of fundamental concepts connected to narrative including, truth, fiction, narrators, and representation. The book's systematic address of these topics in a relatively easy-to-access manner allows the book to serve as a useful resource for educators focused on narratology and related concepts. If one is interested in wading quickly into the depths of "the implications of the concepts of world for narratology" (1), this book is an accessible entry point. The ideas present may also offer considerable provocation for scholars of narratology. Ryan includes primers and exploration not only of their central topic but for many of the concepts fundamental to narrative and fiction. The Introduction alone offers insight and detail of the history of narratology and a foundational understanding of the theory Ryan develops: "[n]arrative texts cannot represent 'all that exists,' but they can, and should, represent how individual existents relate to the people and objects that define their living environment" (7). The book is written in a way that allows each chapter to familiarize the reader with the chapter's focal topic within the context of narratology rather than foregrounding Ryan's storyworld theory of narratology. The chapter topics follow: Truth, Fiction, Narrator, Characters, Plot, Mimesis and Diegesis, Parallel Worlds, Impossible Worlds, Virtual Worlds, and Transmedia Worlds. The expansive and historical orientations present throughout are one of the recurring strengths of A New Anatomy of Storyworlds. They offer straightforward perspective and dominant ideas to which one may align or work against to form one's position. As one moves through the text, within the thoroughness of Ryan's thought, one faces the foundational consideration that any character, any event, must have a world, in the sense of a container, even if that container is a fictional nothingness. This consideration alone makes evident that storyworlds do have a fundamental place within narratives, if not a primacy. The first chapters are particularly interesting though their content makes clear that the body of the text is not limited to pressing major points of the argument for a storyworld-based theory of narratology, so much as immersing the reader in a broad perspective which itself is informed by the storyworld-theory. The first chapter, as an illustration of the approach and tone throughout much of the book, considers in detail the practical consideration of whether truth is an apt defining characteristic of fiction. If one is interested in concepts of truth, this chapter is a highly functional introduction and map of the highlights. It clearly lays out many of the relevant primary texts, such as Aristotle's Metaphysics; Alfred Tarski's The Semantic Conception of Truth (1969); Richard Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989); [End Page 127] David Lewis' Truth in Fiction (1978); and Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (1990), among others. Toward the end of the chapter, there are three sections on truth from a perspective more attuned to narratology. These sections—Fictional Truth, Literary Truth, and Mythical Truth—are additional examples of what makes the book so functional as a broad reader which can take one from beginner toward expert remarkably swiftly. Following these sections, Ryan's reflective conclusion to the Truth chapter returns to a thought introduced at the beginning of the chapter, Alan D. Sokal's 1996 challenge of the postmodernist critique of scientific truth in "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" reprinted in The Sokal Hoax (2000). Ryan conversationally wonders "what would happen if the postmodern critique of truth as correspondence succeeded in bringing the scientific community down to its knees" (33). While it...

The issue of substance is considered one of the most important topics in Aristotle’s philosophy, and understanding it can lead to a better comprehension of the intellectual system of this great Greek philosopher. Aristotle built his philosophy on the recognition of ousia or substance, and all the pillars of his intellectual system, including ontology, epistemology, theology, and cosmology, depend on the essence and form, which in his philosophical system are equivalent to ousia and substance. Thus, it can rightly be said that Aristotle's philosophy is a substantial metaphysics. In Aristotle's metaphysical thought, the essence and whatness always indicate a form of substance, or in other terms, "this thing here." Therefore, the essence and whatness are absolutely predicated upon substance. As Aristotle states in his discussion of definition, the definition pertains solely to substance, and the definition of other categories follows from this. From this perspective, it can be said that whatness pertains only and exclusively to substance, and by this substance, he means substance in its primary sense. Hence, in the present research, we seek to explore Aristotle’s thought regarding the scope and whatness of an object and to show the implications of his theory in physics and metaphysics, addressing the question of whether the whatness of an object is precisely the object and its substance, or something else.

In the fifth chapter of book Θ of his Metaphysics Aristotle takes the view that one possesses the rational potency to do x if and only if in any situation in which all external conditions that are necessary for one's doing x are fulfilled one only needs to have the will to do x in order actually to do x in a skillful way. The modern editors of Aristotle's Metaphysics have made it unnecessarily difficult to understand this chapter, because they deleted a crucial word in a certain sen- tence rather than adding a word that appears to be missing from that sentence.

Reviewed by: Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy by Myles F. Burnyeat Allison Piñeros Glasscock and Elizabeth C. Shaw and Staff* BURNYEAT, Myles F. Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy, vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xii + 395 pp. Cloth, $120.00 The eleven essays in this collection were originally published while Burnyeat was at All Souls College, Oxford (1996–2006) and during his subsequent retirement. Like volume 3 of the same series, the collection was published posthumously, with editorial work undertaken by Carol Atack, Malcolm Schofield, and David Sedley. Part I contains seven essays on topics in ontology and epistemology; part II contains four essays on physics and optics. The figures examined include the usual suspects—Plato and Aristotle (plus an appearance by Aquinas)—but Burnyeat also draws our attention to some less appreciated accomplices to the ancient philosophical project: the Platonist commentator Numenius of Apamea, the Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum, and Anaxarchus of Abdera, a follower of Democritus. The result is a collection that showcases one of Burnyeat's greatest strengths: his ability to identify the clues left for us in ancient texts and to produce from them compelling and exquisitely detailed accounts of what ancient philosophers were thinking and why. One of the final papers of the volume illustrates Burnyeat's detective acumen. "Archytas and optics" starts from the following question: Why is optics absent from the mathematical curriculum Plato sketches in the Republic? Burnyeat hypothesizes that if mathematical optics existed when the Republic was written, Plato likely excised it from the curriculum on the grounds that the discipline would lead the student to focus on visible things and their appearances. The bulk of the paper is devoted to establishing the antecedent of this conditional. Burnyeat argues that mathematical optics did exist at the time of the Republic's writing, and he posits the noncanonical Pythagorean Archytas as its founder. To recognize the significance of this lacuna in the Republic's curriculum and to provide a persuasive identification of the founder of an entire discipline is already to make a substantial contribution to scholarship. But how Burnyeat arrives at his central conclusion is equally impressive. He takes the reader on a tour of Aristotle, Plato, and Iamblichus, fragment 4 of Archytas, and the Apologia of Apuleius (whom readers might better recognize as the novelist responsible for The Golden [End Page 345] Ass). The result is not only an answer to the paper's central question, but a deeper understanding of the broader intellectual network in which canonical figures like Plato and Aristotle operated. No fragment is too small to catch Burnyeat's notice, nor is any line in a manuscript too faint. Part I of the collection includes Burnyeat's famous paper "Kinēsis vs. energeia: a much-read passage in (but not of) Aristotle's Metaphysics." The central argument is that Metaphysics 9.6.1048b18–35 is out of place. It was written by Aristotle for a different context and should not be printed in book 9. Because this article is so well known, I will not dwell on the details of the argument, but once again Burnyeat's methodology is worthy of comment. The first part of the paper offers a careful examination of the Metaphysics's manuscript tradition that attends both to what is present and to what is absent. For example, we learn that the focus passage is missing from an entire branch of the tradition, which Burnyeat suggests is the result of a learned excision. Later, Burnyeat develops a psychological sketch of the scribe of manuscript Ab beginning from the observation that a faint line is drawn through part of the focus passage. He argues that the scribe's motivation is not disapproval of the passage's contents but a desire to keep his text and commentary in sync. Observations like these provide the foundation for Burnyeat's thesis about the philosophical import of the focus passage, and they demonstrate that the physical record can be just as vital to reconstructions of ancient philosophy as the words that the record preserves. Occasionally, Burnyeat offers more direct admonitions to his readers about how to approach ancient philosophy. A key lesson...

ABSTRACT Chapter Θ10 of Aristotle's Metaphysics is traditionally taken to be about the truth of intuitions, namely episodes of an immediate and sub-propositional grasp of entities. This exegesis however saddles Aristotle with a broken-backed theory of truth because in other passages of his works he claims that truth and falsehood apply only to items of a propositional nature and denies that sub-propositional items can be true or false. An alternative exegesis is preferable which takes Θ10 to be about the truth of existential statements and judgements concerning simple items.

We approach the problem about the meaning of Aristotle's Metaphysics from a perspective that, beyond the historiographic and hermeneutical approach of contemporary Aristotelianism, seeks its foundation in the very analytic-modal nature of the first philosophy centered on the concept of ἐνέργεια. Based on this approach, we discard that the text entitled «Metaphysics», whose authorship is attributed to Andrónico de Rodas, is an exposition of Aristotle's first philosopher, defending a new configuration of it in which the metaphysical and logical treatises, published in the corpus Aristotelicum separately, are integral moments of it.

We approach the problem about the meaning of Aristotle's Metaphysics from a perspective that, beyond the historiographic and hermeneutical approach of contemporary Aristotelianism, seeks its foundation in the very analytic-modal nature of the first philosophy centered on the concept of ἐνέργεια. Based on this approach, we discard that the text entitled «Metaphysics», whose authorship is attributed to Andrónico de Rodas, is an exposition of Aristotle's first philosopher, defending a new configuration of it in which the metaphysical and logical treatises, published in the corpus Aristotelicum separately, are integral moments of it.