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A seminar on Aristotle's Metaphysics
The principal text is this:
The Complete Works of Aristotle, Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series), 1984. ISBN 0-691-09950-2. Usually known as the 'Revised Oxford translation,' this is the most convenient way to get all of Aristotle's works in useable form. It costs $79, but if you have a serious interest in philosophy you should have one.
In addition, we will use the following for closer study of the central books of the Metaphysics:
Metaphysics, Books Z and H, translated with a commentary by David Bostock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, ISBN 0198239475.For further suggestions about translations, editions, and secondary literature, here is a little bibliography for this course (changes unpredictably). Marc Cohen at the University of Washington has a much better bibliography of recent work on Aristotle's Metaphysics. Some futher sources of information through the web:
It would be a great help if you had taken an undergraduate course in ancient philosophy (such as our own PHIL 410, Classical Philosophy). I will take for granted some general familiarity with early Greek philosophy, including the Presocratics, Socrates, and Plato. No knowledge of Greek is required.
There are four kinds of work required in this class:
This is a graduate seminar on Aristotle's Metaphysics. That is not quite the same thing as a seminar on Aristotle's metaphysics: the Metaphysics is a book, and although there is a good deal about metaphysics in it, there is also much more. In terms of content, it would be better to describe this as a seminar on Aristotle's concept of philosophy. However, that too can be misleading: the word "philosophy" has a much narrower sense in contemporary usage than it (or the corresponding Greek word) did for Aristotle (or, for that matter, than the word "philosophy" itself did in, say, the seventeenth century). What this is really a seminar on is what Aristotle says he's trying to present in the Metaphysics: an account of what he calls "first philosophy".
As it turns out, Aristotle's first philosophy includes what we nowadays think of as metaphysics: a philosophical attempt to answer the question "What exists?" However, there is more to the Metaphysics than simply an exploration of this question. For one thing, Aristotle begins the treatise with a lengthy discussion of what first philosophy is and why we ought to pursue it. To answer this, he must say a good deal about his conception of knowledge and even what the good life for human beings is. Thus, studying the Metaphysics leads readily into issues we should prefer to call epistemological and ethical. Moreover, one of the issues to which Aristotle devotes the greatest attention is how it is even possible to do first philosophy. To see just why this is an issue for him, we will need to explore some issues in philosophical methodology: from a modern perspective, we might say that the issue is whether there is a distinctive method for philosophy as opposed to natural science, or mathematics, or ethics. A full appreciation of this will also require us to see where logic, or something like logic, falls in Aristotle's scheme of things. To do that with any depth, of course, we need to address some properly philosophical questions on their own, e.g.: Is there a distinct method of philosophy? What is the position of logic in the scheme of things? As it turns out, any appreciation of Aristotle's own way of answering these questions requires that we look at his relationship to his philosophical predecessors (especially Plato) and to his own understanding of that relationship (an issue he was extremely aware of himself).
So, in studying Aristotle's Metaphysics, we will study considerably more than Aristotle's metaphysics. We will also need to give at least some attention to some more scholarly issues. The fact is that Aristotle himself did not use the word "metaphysics". He didn't use it in Greek, either, and that for two reasons: (1) in Greek it's not a word but a phrase; (2) it was first used by commentators at least some centuries after Aristotle, and initially as the title of a book (we leave it to the reader to infer which book that was). In Greek, ta meta ta phusika means "what comes after the things on nature": It was used as a name for the Metaphysics. One common, and quite plausible, interpretation of this title is that it means "the treatises that come next in order [in a standard edition] after the various treatises on natural science". That is in fact where the Metaphysics comes in the ordering that appears to have been standardized by about the first century of our era: after all of the various works on natural science and before all the various works on ethics, politics, and poetry. Our word "metaphysics" descends from this, of course, so historically it might be said that metaphysics is just the subject discussed in the Metaphysics, whatever that is.
At this point, however, another complication arises. The route by which the Aristotelian treatises came down to us (or even to the Aristotelian commentators three centuries after Aristotle) is not entirely clear: it is quite possible that the treatises as we know them were sometimes assembled by editors from shorter works by Aristotle, perhaps with some editorial smoothing here and there. In the case of the Metaphysics, this issue becomes crucial. As it happens, the fourteen Books of the Metaphysics do not always fit together well (we will consider the details later). Indeed, there is no doubt that the Metaphysics as we know it is not entirely Aristotle's work: even in ancient times, its second Book (called "little alpha") was known to be by Pasicles of Rhodes, not Aristotle. How much, then, of the current organization of the Metaphysics reflects Aristotle's own editorial work, and how much is a matter of later editors stringing together several independent treatises? This question has been the subject of considerable controversy in the present century.
There is another, and for our purposes more crucial, issue here: even assuming that everything in the Metaphysics (apart from Book ii) is by Aristotle, does the entire treatise represent a single stage of his thought? This question was the focus of much Aristotelian scholarship in the first half of the century, following the work of two scholars (Thomas Case and Werner Jaeger) who independently argued that it is possible to trace the story of Aristotle's philosophical development from the contents of his treatises. Such a developmental approach, as it is called, seeks to explain inconsistencies between different treatises, or different sections of the same treatise, by supposing that the conflicting passages date from different periods in Aristotle's career. Case and Jaeger both argued that Aristotle's development took a particular course, defined principally by the relationship of his views to those of Plato. Other interpreters have argued for different developmental stories.
For our purposes in this course, the important point aboud developmental views is that they lead to certain interpretive strategies: when Aristotle seems to say inconsistent things in different places, the developmentalist strategy is to suppose that one place is earlier than the other. Of course, really developing a developmental account is more complex than that. There must be some coherent story that defines the various periods of his development, for instance. However, a developmentalist interpretation faces much less pressure to reconcile apparent contradictions in the treatises: the contradictions are real, but they are diachronic, so Aristotle himself will not have held contradictory views at the same time. I plan to spend a little time discussing whether this is a good or a bad thing about developmentalist interpretations and non-developmentalist alternatives.
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