Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 500
EAN num: 9780198720850
ISBN number: 0198720858
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 236
Printing Date: December 09, 1976
Publishing house: Oxford University Press, USA
Sale Popularity Level: 3469648
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
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Joe Sachs has followed up his sucess with his translation of Aristotle's Physics, published by Rutgers University Press, with a new translation of Metaphysics. Sachs's translations bring distinguished new light onto Aristotle's works, which are foundational to history of science. Sachs translates Aristotle with an authenticity that was lost when Aristotle was translated into Latin and abstract Latin words came to stand for concepts Aristotle expressed with phrases in everyday Greek language. When the works began being translated into English, those abstract Latin words or their cognates were used, thus suggesting a level of jargon and abstraction, and in some cases misleading interpretation, which was not Aristotle's language or style. These important new translations open up Aristotle's original thought to readers.
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I read this book for a graduate seminar on Aristotle.
Topic of Metaphysics is Ousia=substance and being. What is the meaning of being? With respect to matter and form, it is primarily about form. Analytically both can be separate and distinct, but not in reality. One can analyze matter by potentiality and actuality. Matter can't answer the question of being without form. Some natural things are always a composite of matter and form, it is the answer to the question of what is ousia or being in nature. Matter by itself can't give us the answer to what a thing is.
Ousia=substance and being. Ousia= Being is the "this" spoken of in primary ousia. This is contrary to Plato. Categories vs. Metaphysics. We can talk of the "being" as quality as "not white." Being spoken of in many ways but only of one thing, i.e., "the focal being." Word being has flexibility. Other flexible words is essence. (the what it is to be). In Greek for Aristotle, a bed is not an Ousia because it is from techne=craft it can have an essence. Ousia is reserved for material things self manufactured in nature. All things are derived from a primary ousia.
This has to do with focal being, health is such a word. When we talk about different aspects of health, it is not a universal definition like Socrates looks for. Aristotle says you can't find it. Thus, the word "being" is just a word in a sense a focal point like the word health, i.e. healthy skin, healthy food, then there is health, for Socrates what is health. Aristotle says no, health is unity by analogy. Aristotle is OK with using examples. Math is not independent knowledge, it is dependent on things math is not a primary existence. Being is neither a universal nor a genus, (genus is animal in hierarchy). It is as though Aristotle wants to say that the primary meaning of being is the "this" the subject, i.e. Socrates not human all by itself, not animal all by itself.
Ousia= Being is the "this" spoken of in primary ousia. This is contrary to Plato. Categories vs. Metaphysics. "This" is ontologically primary. Ontological= the most general branch of metaphysics, concerned with the nature of being.
In the categories discussion, he doesn't talk about the distinction between matter and form, it comes later on in the Physics and then the Metaphysics. The "this" is ontologically primary in terms of what the "being" something, what something is. Why would it be wrong to say that primary ousia can't be primary from the standpoint of knowledge, it can't be the distinction between ontological and epistemological? Why would it be wrong to say that the "this" the perceptible encounter wouldn't be primary from the standpoint of knowledge? Because, whatever the categories are whatever the notions of say "horse" the "this" is a horse, the "this" is ontologically primary, but it can't be epistemologically primary because a "this" by itself is just a "this" the question "What is this" called a horse is to involve the categories of knowledge. Therefore, from a knowledge standpoint, secondary ousia, which is things like categories and context, they have primacy in knowledge. However, from the standpoint of "being" the perceptible "this" has primacy. This is just a technical way of distancing him from Plato. In the Metaphysics, the question of form is primary Ousia. Ousia =form in Metaphysics. In Metaphysics, the "this" is simply matter. Aristotle did not give up on Ousia as form. This matter and form is never separated for Aristotle, thus a composite of matter and form is in the Metaphysics. In realm of nature, form and matter can't be separated for Aristotle. If you only talk about matter, you have nothing definable. You never come across things without their form. God is only exception to form and matter together.
Ousia as form and essence. The essence of a thing is "what" it is, it gives us knowledge. Definition= essence. Bronze can't be essence of circle, the form is important, not the matter.
Can't use abstract math to explain a human. When it comes to knowledge, we must emphasize the ousia as form. It isn't that very first you have material things, and then the mind adds form to it, whatever the particular thing is, it always was that form. Then when we learn about it, we actually just discover what the thing is. Therefore, it is a process of coming to understand the universal, the essence, but that was always there in the thing, it just needed to be done. So what he is emphasizing in the Metaphysics is the idea of ousia as form, as some kind of essence, but never separated from matter!
Ousia --1. Grammatically basic. 2. Ousia As Ontologically basic, something that exists in its own right. The 1st example is how humans speak, the 2nd example is how things really are, both are both side of the same coin.
Principle of Noncontradiction
Arche= principle, ... Read More
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I preface this with one caveat: I am not a Greek scholar. I have, however, read this book, in toto, in this translation. I have also read, though not in its entirety, another translation. Joe Sachs, positively a very intelligent scholar of these texts, has tried to put it into what he considers to be true to the Greek. Again, I am not a scholar of the Greek language, but I think that Sachs goes 'overboard,' if you will, in presenting to us, the laypeople, a translation beyond what is really necessary to get the job done. By that, I mean that a traditional translation is more than adequate, so long as you don't try to get at the Thomistic textual analysis at very first go-round, or so I'm told. There are several chapters (keeping in mind, this is Aristotle's Metaphysics we're talking about) where I had trouble discerning pages at a time, reading and re-reading just for an objective account of what Aristotle was saying, or trying to say through Dr. Sachs. The Metaphysics should be read; that is not the question. The question is whether this is the translation for you. I, for one, will say that it is not. Not because of uncanny foresight, but due to the difficult readability of such a complex exposition on reality, being, and, in the concluding chapters of course, God. So, I give this version 3 stars: as a text in itself, it is good; it is not a wonderfully understandable translation, however. I hope that this verbose review has been beneficial for you.
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I've not read Sachs's translation of the Metaphysics, though I did work through his version of the Physics during a summer at St. John's College (where he teaches). His Metaphysics was circulating as a xerox copy at the college bookstore; I'm glad to see it in print.
Anyone unfortunate enough (as I am) to read Aristotle in English rather than ancient Greek, can benefit from Sachs's translations, though it remains worthwhile to have something like the classic Oxford translation alongside, to compare their senses of the Greek text. Sachs's object is to recover what Aristotle may've been up to, by avoiding the Latinate terminology that haunts Aristotle studies and trying to find more "authentic" meanings for the Greek words. Whatever his ultimate sucess or failure, it's wonderful to have such a fresh approach to the translation of Aristotle available.
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This translation of Aristotle from the Greek directly into modern English makes use of the scholarship surrounding the efforts which have been most successful with Heidegger.
`Thus, the way I understand *to ti en einai* departs from, but is rooted in, Owen's understanding of it. The same is true of my rendering *ousia* as "thinghood," when it is used in a general sense, and as "an independent thing" when it is used of singulars. I have heard two sorts or criticism of my use of the word thinghood in Aristotle's PHYSICS. The one sort, that it occasions laughter or embarrassment, is a general instance of Heidegger's observation in WHAT IS A THING? that philosophy is that at which thoughtless people laugh. Let the laughter or embarrassment subside, and then judge the meaning carried by the word, both on its own and in its context, on its merits. The other sort of criticism regrets the fact that thinghood is not as closely related to being as *ousia* is to *to on.* . . .' (p. xxxvii).
"Lassie is an *ousia,* and the *ousia* of Lassie is dog." (p. xxxviii).
Intellectuals need to pay attention to the concepts that are used in their own fields, if nowhere else, and Aristotle was close to the peak of ancient Greek intellectual attainment.
"Aristotle invents a second word, being-at-work-staying-itself (entelecheia), converging with it in meaning, to sharpen and clarify his use of being-at-work, and he gives an array of examples in which we are meant to `see at a glance by means of analogy,' what it means (1048a 39)." (p. xxxix).
In the beginning of this book, ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS, Translated by Joe Sachs, there is a Greek Glossary with 49 words or phrases on three pages, followed by an English Glossary of 43 words or phrases on eleven pages. "This is a slightly revised version of the glossary that appears with the translation of the PHYSICS, based upon those passages in which Aristotle explains and clarifies his own usage. Bekker page numbers from 184 to 267 refer to the PHYSICS; those from 980 to 1093 are in the METAPHYSICS." (p. xlix).
Chapters are short, especially in Book V (Book Delta), which Joe Sachs calls "Things Meant in More than One Way." This has usually been considered "a dictionary, but Aristotle himself, at the beginnings of Books VII and X, says that it is about the various ways things are meant. The point is not to define words but to collect and organize the distinct senses of important words meant in more than one way. These ambiguities are not verbal but inherent in things, and Aristotle steadfastly preserves them." (p. 77, n. 1).
I am not particularly fond of this book. If undergraduate college courses are meant to provide students with general outlook on likely events, and graduate schools at major universities are intended to select those students who want to qualify for cutting edge work in a highly specialized professional discipline, the works of Aristotle seem to be the high point of a Greek endeavor to create an upper level above anything that had previously been considered possible. Alexander the Great, as a student of Aristotle, might be faulted for aspiring to far more than what could be useful, just as Heidegger seemed to be pushing for a German spirit that was sure to damn the rest of the world to misery when he assumed a place in the leadership of a German university backing Hitler and the Nazi party.
I did not find Aristotle's approach to religion in Book VI to be inspiring, though it does seem to be intellectual. "But if there is anything that is everlasting and motionless and separate, . . .
"And while it is necessary that all causes be everlasting, these are so most of all, since they are responsible for what appears to us of the divine. Therefore there would be three sorts of contemplative philosophy, the mathematical, the natural, and the theological; for it is not hard to see that if the divine is present anywhere, it is present in a nature of this kind, and that the most honorable study must be about the most honorable class of things. The contemplative studies, then, are more worthy of choice than are the other kinds of knowledge, and this one is more worthy of choice than are the other contemplative studies." (pp. 110-111).
This is a nice priority for an established church to maintain its dignity, but it is far more ancient than modern. It is not clear how infinite his "triangle containing two right angles" (p. 112) is supposed to be. Even his attempts to tiptoe around the major stereotypes of ancient bookworms seem limp. "For instance, it is neither always nor for the most part that someone pale has a refined education, but since it sometimes happens, it will be incidental (or if not, everything would be by necessity)." (p. 113).
The Index only mentions three pages in Aristotle's text for Socrates, though Aristotle often uses his name as an ... Read More
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