Metaphysics, Volume I: Books 1–9

Metaphysics, Volume I: Books 1–9

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<p>Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367€“47); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias€s relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 343€“2 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip€s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of €œPeripatetics€), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander€s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322. Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows: I. Practical: <i>Nicomachean Ethics</i>; <i>Great Ethics</i> (<i>Magna Moralia</i>); <i>Eudemian Ethics</i>; <i>Politics</i>; <i>Oeconomica</i> (on the good of the family); <i>Virtues and Vices</i>.</p><p> II. Logical: <i>Categories</i>; <i>On Interpretation</i>; <i>Analytics</i> (<i>Prior</i> and <i>Posterior</i>); <i>On Sophistical Refutations</i>; <i>Topica</i>.</p><p> III. Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.</p><p> IV. <i>Metaphysics</i>: on being as being.</p><p> V. On Art: <i>Art of Rhetoric</i> and <i>Poetics</i>.</p><p> VI. Other works including the <i>Athenian Constitution</i>; more works also of doubtful authorship.</p><p> VII. Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.</p>