Aristotle and the Science of Metaphysics lect. 3

Because this lecture occurred a number of weeks ago prior to hurricane Ike and I cannot seem to find all my notes from class this reflection will be rather spotty.

Aristotle's Metaphysics: I; II; IV. 1; V. 7-8; VI. 1-2

The scientific ordering and presentation has produced a myriad of interpretations from the traditionalist position influenced by the Medieval commentary tradition who took it for granted that the Metaphysics was Aristotle's presentation of a science that followed the order of a science as presented in his Posterior Analytics. Despite the perspicuous heritage of this tradition the recent Aristotelian progeny are not so confident in the merits or success of Aristotle's project to achieve scientific knowledge in the myriad of subject domains he investigates. Some members of this group go so far as to deny to the texts tradition has called the Metaphysics, any authorial continuity and presentation. They subscribe to a position that the Metaphysics was a unorganized collection of lecture notes "thrown" together by later Greek editors, not knowing what to label this discrete collection of texts, and seeing that it was arranged after the texts on natural philosophy or physics, decided to call it after-physics or meta-physics. H.G. Apostle offers a presentation of this account in the introduction to his translation of the Metaphysics along with his own argument to the contrary. There is a great abundance of literature on this topic but it is outside the concerns of my own class which is on Avicenna's Metaphysics.

Avicenna certainly thought Aristotle presented a unified science within treatise called the Metaphysics and it is incumbent on any interpretor of Avicenna's own Metaphysics of the Healing to take into consideration his perspective on the Aristotelian sciences, and of course especially, metaphysics.

The problem that leads to such great diversity of opinion on the proper assesment of Aristotle's Metaphysics is the seemingly incongruent definitions found within the Metaphyiscs itself, definitions of a subject-genus that lead to different understanding of the underlying intelligible arrangement of the books themselves. In some places we find Aristotle defining the particular science under investigation as a science of being qua being and its proper attributes. (Meta. IV, 1) However in other places he defines his inquiry as a divine science or theology (Meta. VI, 1)

Nearly all of Aristotle's sciences offer an introductory dialectical treatment of past attempts to establish the principles of a particular science. There is a precedence for this in the De Anima and Phyiscs amongst other treatises. If we take this into consideration then there are two possible interpretation suggested for the whole order of the Metaphysics.

What is a Science?

A brief reminder, a science consists in three parts:

1. A Subject-Genus
2. Proper Principles
3. Proper Attributes (Conclusions)
   

What Kind of Science is the Metaphysics?

1. Theology: If we take the science of first philosophy as being a divine science it would suggest that Aristotle is presenting an enduraing dialectical treatment of principles up until Bk. XII where the Science of Theology finally begins.
2. Being qua Being: If we take first philosophy as a science of being as such then the dialectical treatment ends at bk. III because he begins his treatment of being qua being with bk. IV
3. There is a possible synthesis available wherein 2. leads into 1., but this would require a deeper textual explanation, and as we shall see this is in fact what Avicenna does himself, though much more explicitly.

Accordingly a divisio textus of the Metaphysics could be taken as:

• Bk. I-III : Dialectial investigation of principles and proper attributes to be considered in the science.
• Bk. IV and VI : Accounts of the subject and principles of Metaphysics
• Bk. V : Definitions
• Bk. VII-IX : Primary Considerations of the subject of Metaphyisics
• Bk. X-XI : Unifying of the former
• Bk. XII-XIV : Theology

n.b. For the Arab commentators books I (A) and II (a) were inverted.