The Metaphysics of Aristotle (MacMahon)
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- John Henry MacMahon
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~340,000 words · 1,595 passages
Cite this work
- APAAristotle. (n.d.). The Metaphysics of Aristotle (MacMahon). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/the-metaphysics-of-aristotle-macmahon
- MLAAristotle. "The Metaphysics of Aristotle (MacMahon)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/the-metaphysics-of-aristotle-macmahon.
- ChicagoAristotle. The Metaphysics of Aristotle (MacMahon). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/the-metaphysics-of-aristotle-macmahon.
What it is about
The book that asks what 'being' means, and which gave a whole discipline its name by accident: it was called that because it came after the Physics in the ordering of the works.
Context and history
It is not a single book but a set of treatises brought together, and it shows: there are repetitions and different beginnings. The core is the question of what Aristotle calls being qua being — not this thing or that, but what it means to say of anything that it is — and the answer runs through substance, through the distinction between potency and act, and through the criticism of the ideas of Plato, his teacher. Book XII contains the unmoved mover, which medieval theology would identify with God. Book I opens with the sentence 'all men by nature desire to know', and Book II contains the earliest surviving historical survey of philosophy.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover. Marks, notations and other maiginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the publisher to a library and finally to you. Usage guidelines Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we liave taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying. We also ask that you: personal, non-commercial purposes. personal, non-commercial purposes. + Refrain fivm automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help. + Maintain attributionTht GoogXt "watermark" you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find + Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsibl