Aristotle - Metaphysics

[Anonymous No.17475567]

Aristotle’s Metaphysics has a reputation for being very difficult. But if I’m relatively familiar with Scholastic ideas, would I be able to read it without too much trouble? I’ve read some of the basic stuff by Feser, but also some more in-depth works by Etienne Gilson, Joseph Owens, and Garrigou-Lagrange. Is that enough or would I need more background to appreciate Aristotle? And would it be worth doing to begin with?

Side question, what’s the best translation? The Reeves edition for Hackett seems to be the general consensus.

[Anonymous No.17475578]

>>17475567
Just wanted to throw out a vote for Sachs' translation. He is a very careful translator, and his preface does a good job of explaining some of his more idiosyncratic choices.

[Anonymous No.17475582]

Start with the Greeks

[Anonymous No.17475618]

>>17475578
I’ve also heard good things about Sachs.

>>17475582
I’ve read The Republic, plus a couple other dialogues I found at a used book store. Any other particularly necessary works? I figured De Anima and a few other of Aristotle’s writings, but I don’t know if, say, the pre-Socratics are necessary or if there’s secondary literature that summarizes it better. I did like Gilson’s perspective in Being and Some Philosophers.

[Anonymous No.17475775]

>>17475618
He makes a lot of reference to various other writings, so some sort of primer on the presocratics might be good, some Plato at least to get the basic ideas, De Anima is good, Physics would also be good, as would Nichomachean Ethics. If nothing else at least these last 3 because he introduces certain concepts that he will then just throw at you in the Metaphysics assuming you already know them.

[Anonymous No.17475891]

>>17475775
So the Physics is worth reading from a philosophical perspective?

[Anonymous No.17475934]

>>17475775
How much of the Organon is recommended before reading Metaphysics?

[Anonymous No.17475936]

Most of the difficult comes from understanding how the different oddball aspects all hang together. If you already know the scholastics you presumably already know many of those, like dunamis and entelecheia, albeit in a more systematized fashion, so you will have a head start. The ambiguities of Aristotle's thought result from the lack of system and the need to reconstruct that system. The main challenge to understanding him is the sheer feeling of "so that's it? it's just a bunch of weird shit that sorta fits together, and then on top of that there's a fanciful metaphysical world-system?" You have to spend a lot of time with it before major elements and segments of it start to make sense, which you may already have done with the scholastics, but even then, I think the whole never sits completely easily on top of the parts even after you're familiar with them.

Then again, I have never understood neothomists apart from a few transcendental thomists who are closer to Christian platonists anyway. So maybe there is a certain disposition that just doesn't mind memorising a bunch of weird shit and clicking it all together, and doesn't have that gut feeling of "but WHY?" at the end that I get.

You may find Aristotle less systematic and internally fragmented than he is presented by the thomists, if you read proper historicist and hermeneutic attempts at reconstruction of his ideas. I recommend Rist's Mind of Aristotle for that. Thomists tend away from developmentalism, which is the thesis that Aristotle's ideas changed and thus to understand him you must understand how they changed. Rist will show you the nitty-gritty of how hard it is to reconstruct Aristotle's "overall view" in the Metaphysics. Once again, all you can do is get a high level of awareness of all the moving parts.

My advice in trying to understand Aristotle is to try to understand the central "outlooks" or "hunches" that govern his thinking. One of the most important of them is that he has a radically different conception of movement/change from what we would reflexively think of movement/change today. One of his strengths is in trying to be extremely phenomenologically/ontologically primordial. He generally doesn't presume anything. The problem with this is that if you are still presuming things, if you haven't "deconstructed" some of your acquired prejudices, he can seem even more arbitrary than he really is. But if you attend to etymology, and you study the progression of his conceptions and their origins in earlier Greek thought, certain things will stand out even if you don't otherwise end up like Aristotle, for example the movement/change thing. He is really not concerned there with "movement" in a simple sense but with categorising and thematising ALTERATION in the broadest possible sense (which of course breaks down into subordinate senses). From there it becomes much easier to understand his otherwise arbitrary-seeming theory of causes. And so on.

[Anonymous No.17475945]

>>17475567
>I’ve read some of the basic stuff by Feser, but also some more in-depth works by Etienne Gilson, Joseph Owens, and Garrigou-Lagrange.
I see my shilling has been successful.

[Anonymous No.17476000]

>>17475936
Addendum: As another head start on understanding Aristotle I recommend understanding Eudoxus' relation to Plato. Eudoxus is an immanentist even when he was trying to formalise Plato. His "platonism" is proto-hedonist, proto-eudaimonist, in the classical sense of hedonism where disinterested contemplation is identified with the highest pleasure. Aristotle was quite possibly deeply influenced by Eudoxus. Rist's reconstruction will go over all this but this is one thing I would keep at the forefront. It helps to explain Aristotle's radical immanentism.

Again, most of the best "action" goes on behind the scenes like this. Aristotle's rejection of platonic forms as "substances" is fascinating in a logical and phenomenological sense. You can see very clearly there that he is evaluating every thesis for its logico-phenomenological validity prior to allowing us to play with it metaphorically or symbolically, whereas Plato had freely passed back and forth between the logico-phenomenological and symbolic-metaphorical domains because fundamentally his conception of reason is gradated and Aristotle's isn't -- for Aristotle reason is reason.

Elements of the system make much more sense once you get an eye for these (at first) hidden kernels of phenomenological "hardness" that Aristotle seems to prefer proceeding from. For example, the uncreatedness of the world and the function(s) of God in it are necessary consequences of Aristotle's rejection of transcendence.

It's also good to study Aristotle's reception. His immediate followers may have qualified some of his more idiosyncratic ideas in ways that seem surprisingly "modern." It can take the edge off a little bit when you realise that even his contemporaries may have gone "uh Aristotle, x is a little weird.." after you had the same gut hunch.

Also make sure to study his reception by Andronicus of Rhodes (mostly editor) and Alexander of Aphrodisias (systematiser and commentator), as well as the neoplatonics. Once again, it is refreshing to see neoplatonics freely disputing his categorisation of primordial causes or etc., because it shows that at no time (other than perhaps the Middle Ages) were his ideas simply accepted as gospel.

Can't emphasise enough that the most useful thing I think Aristotle has to offer is his logico-phenomenological method, rather than any of his specific ideas necessarily. Even just the moment when it finally clicked for me what he was doing with corruption/generation, the way that he has BUILT INTO his ideas and language that we need to begin with what is ABSOLUTELY primordial logically and phenomenologically in a concept because we can't assume ANYTHING, is quite beautiful, almost Husserlian at times. Heidegger said something like, study Aristotle for 10 years. Easy for him to say as a former Jesuit trainee and Aristotle scholar but still not far off.

[Anonymous No.17476257]

>>17475945
Ed pls. Feser’s work is a good intro for the layman, but honestly I think his value comes more from preparing you to read the other authors I mentioned than in and of itself.

>>17475936
>>17476000
Magisterial posts there anon, I appreciate it. I have a decent conception of Aristotle’s basic ideas and the challenges they presented to Platonism/Neoplatonism, and how they were integrated and massaged into a cohesive system by Aquinas. I think it would be an overstatement to say that the scholastics saw a big systematic framework in Aristotle, rather that Christian Neoplatonism reached some irreconcilable difficulties between its philosophy and its theology and that elements of Aristotle (act/potency, moderate realism, prime mover, etc) were able to reconcile the two into a synthesis that combined the insights of both schools. Alasdair MacIntyre in particular is a great read on that, and Gilson too. I’d recommend reading those two if you want to understand more about Thomism’s uniqueness. It sounds like if I read a few other Aristotle books first I could get some good value from the Metaphysics, thanks for the contribution to the thread.

[Anonymous No.17476312]

>>17476257
>Ed pls. Feser’s work is a good intro for the layman, but honestly I think his value comes more from preparing you to read the other authors I mentioned than in and of itself.
Yeah, that's why I shill him as opposed to Suarez or something. I'm not trying to shill to seasoned neo-Aristotelians, I'm trying to shill to /lit/ pseuds who probably read Aristotle but never took him seriously after reading some G*rman or An*lo.

[Anonymous No.17476331]

>>17475891
Absolutely, the Metaphysics is an attempt to deepen the question about what nature is.

>>17475934
Controversial take, but not really, the Organon is philosophically dependent on the Metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.17476468]

Serious question. Why does Aristotle consider the change of change to be impossible in Physics V.2? He says, if something changes from white to black, how is that change supposed to get warmer or colder for example. But did he not consider that it could get faster, which could have led him to Newton? I find it a bit puzzling how no ancient philosopher ever thought of the concept of acceleration.

[Anonymous No.17476641]

>>17476312
Lmao. Do you have an opinion on which of the old scholastics (besides Tommy himself of course) are worth reading? Or is there not much point in reading things older than the 20th century? Guys like Cajetan or St John of the Cross.

[Anonymous No.17476691]

>>17476468
They knew about acceleration, the issue was how to go about analyzing it. The modern analysis of acceleration seems heavily dependent upon symbolic mathematics. Maybe the issue is instead why the ancients had such doubts about being able to treat geometric magnitudes arithmetically.

[Anonymous No.17477032]

>>17476468
They thought in qualitative not quantitative terms, I guess quantitative mechanics required Galileo and Descartes revolutionising method and making it thinkable on paper. Remember, astronomy until the 16th century was essentially considered a subset of geometry, because it was so abstract and dealt with bodies whose movements were so ethereal and non-terrestrial. Even Kepler, who was an incredibly powerful and genius mathematician, didn't REALLY make the revolutionary move of thinking of all motion in terms of re-applications of the mathematised celestrial mechanics he was familiar with. He went from those mechanics to a neo-pythagorean/platonic worldview in which ultimate reality is mathematical, but NOT in the way we think of that statement now. "Reality is mathematical" for him meant some kind of math mysticism, "reality is mathematical" for us now means Newtonian mechanics like you are thinking.

It took Galileo to bring the methods of Kepler (his friend) down to earth and start applying them to everyday objects. Already in Galileo you have things like abstract considerations of inertia, I always remember the ball on a frictionless plane for example. Try getting anything like that from Aristotle. The list of things they didn't notice is staggering but it makes sense if you realise they just FELT differently about the world. They simply did not quantise it. Even Kepler didn't. Something happened in the Cartesian revolution that changed this.

Interestingly, it wasn't just a return to materialism. Gassendi was more of an ancient-style materialist than the Cartesians, and he was more Aristotelian than them, more qualitative physics than quantitative. Something specifically quantitative happened with Descartes and Galileo. Galileo himself expresses amazement, repeated amazement, that "everyone knows falling bodies speed up and then reach a maximum speed, but no one has thought to MEASURE the speed?!"

Check out the book From The Closed World to the Infinite Universe by Koyre. Or Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.

>>17476691
This is true too but it's a chicken and egg problem. It really seems like they had the intuitions first, and that's where the tremendous explosion of abstract mathematics, and especially the wedding of geometry with algebra, came from. Then of course it's a fairly logical progression toward modern, highly abstract algebraic geometry.

This is another thing worth noting. The ancient Greeks had extreme problems thinking of, VISUALISING, the connection or lack thereof between geometry and math. Calculus itself is predicated on an unproveable hypothesis, effectively a non-mathematical ontological leap, that a geometrical continuum is IDENTICAL WITH infinitesimal numerical sequences. That is an assumption, not a result, of our modern mathematics, and it is an assumption that arises from the practical needs of a physics-oriented, mechanics-oriented, dynamics-oriented math. Kline talks about this.

[Anonymous No.17477059]

>>17476257
Thanks a lot and also you're welcome anon, do you have any recommendations for getting into Aquinas in a deep way, after looking at Gilson/MacIntyre? Your description resonates with what I've come to suspect, and I am already a fan of Gilson (and Maritain) from their lighter writings, but have never been able to tackle Aquinas properly. Every time I end up digging around in the Summa for some specific issue I am extremely impressed by him but I'm always left wondering what the overall, background metaphysics of the system is. Does MacIntyre touch on metaphysics too? I always thought he was an ethics oriented thinker.

Good luck with Aristotle. I highly recommend Rist. It's a bit tough at first, and hard to recommend to a newbie, but you are hardly that so I think you will enjoy it. It also has a riveting overview of the Academy and Aristotle's relation to it. Really brings it to life.

[Anonymous No.17477355]

>>17477059
MacIntyre is primarily ethics but not exclusively, I think some of his most valuable work in his books Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. In those he shows not only the failures of the Enlightenment conception of “universal reason” but also the shortcomings of the postmodern critique of it, and posits the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition as an alternative. He touches a bit on the metaphysical aspects as well in WJWR. I highly recommend those books.

On the more metaphysical side, I’ve read Joseph Owens’ An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, which basically takes the Summa and Gilson’s work and summarizes their basic framework. Very good, I like the existential Thomist viewpoint. John Wippel also has a great book on Aquinas’ metaphysics, but I haven’t read that one yet. As far as Thomas himself goes, there’s the Summa of course, but a better intro is his Shorter Summa, which I found helpful. See pic related.

[Anonymous No.17477394]

>>17477355
Awesome, thanks for all this. May be some summer reading for me. Do you think Kreeft is good?

I think a lot about problems with the universality of (discursive) reason but normally within an explicitly platonic framework where the solution is "vertical," so the idea of an Aristotelian one is tantalising.

Have you ever read Bernard Lonergan or Norris Clarke? Or Hartshorne's process theology?

[Anonymous No.17477978]

>>17477394
No problem. I’ve not read Kreeft but I’ve heard good things about him. I think he wrote a summary of the Summa, might be worth checking out. And I’ve heard of process theology but none of those authors. The gist of it is that God doesn’t know the future, right?