Preface

Summary

If he does prefer to reserve judgement on the matter, it is hoped that the reader of this book will not be indisposed to receive the most reliable witness to the existence of aporetic in particularly the Metaphysics of Aristotle: that of the philosopher himself. All interpretations of Aristotle are hypothetical; it cannot therefore be intolerable to set on one side complex theories both of manuscript emendation and chronological development, leading to the establishment of a normative interpretation which, it is hoped, would liberate catenas of texts from overall discord. In order to understand the text's own intrinsic qualities it is necessary to go behind the systematisations of the older commentators, the nature of whose interest in the text hardly allowed them to consider the possibility of errancy in the tradition, and the modern commentators to whom discrepancy in thought is an invitation to speculate on codical infidelity and chronological evolution. To suppose that aporetic is central to his thought is not necessarily to his discredit: indeed, the impression is given that, in a way reminiscent of the less compact dialectic of Plato, Aristotle relished its appearance as facilitating entrance into the subject matter. In his own case it provoked an exceptional intelligence, with unprecedented analytical competence, to return again and again to the moments of an analysis which intentionally bore, unchanged, the terminology given in the analysis of Plato, in the searching critique of which his own was born.