Publisher's Synopsis
Except for Book Ⅴ, the author of this current book edited and annotated Aristotle's reasoning in the chapters on Metaphysics to make the classic of ancient Greece a simplified version for everyone to read today. Such reasoning has received little attention recently, especially in the form presented in this modern version as a unique system roughly divided into three parts, namely thesis, demonstration and conclusion (see Appendix). This book comprises reasoning or demonstrations selected from the original text of the English version of Metaphysics with the chapter titles indicating the thesis, main part and necessary annotations marked by sequential numbers and 【】, and the conclusion part placed at the end. Cross-chapter demonstrations were integrated by merging them; the beginning or end of each chapter in Metaphysics commonly forms a thesis, conclusion and/or both, and the middle of the chapter is the specific and merged demonstration. This book is about half the length of Metaphysics, and parts that were minor or were irrelevant to the demonstrations have been removed; therefore, Metaphysics is no longer difficult for readers to read. If the readers are able to grasp the demonstrations, they can understand the main content of each chapter. We aim to use the consolidated demonstrations to show the reasoning in Metaphysics by reproducing their internal structure and main content; the complexity of the original classic means that this modern version is not a simple excerpt or compilation but rather a complete system of demonstrations. This book should be compared to the Greek or other language versions of Metaphysics by comparing the approximate number of pages and lines of Bakker standard provided in the book; readers can fully grasp the entire work by reading it sentence-by-sentence and chapter-by-chapter. The English versions from which this book quotes are Metaphysics by W.D. Ross (Central Compilation & Translation Press, 2012) and Metaphysics by W.D. Ross (eBooks@Adelaide, 2004), and the Greek reference material for the book is from W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). The current author thinks that some key terms (see below) should be changed, for instance, 'substance' to 'basic being', 'substratum' to 'subject', 'category' to 'prediction', and 'essence' to 'being in virtue of itself', to better belong to the vocabulary and grammar of language so that readers would be able to read properly.This book is also in some measure the product of Aristotle's requirements, which he set forth in Chapter 3 of Book Ⅱof Metaphysics ："The effect which lectures produce on a hearer depends on his habits; for we demand the language we are accustomed to, and that which is different from this seems not in keeping but somewhat unintelligible and foreign because of its unwontedness......Thus some people do not listen to a speaker unless he speaks mathematically, others unless he gives instances, while others expect him to cite a poet as witness......Hence one must be already trained to know how to take each sort of argument" (994b33-995a13)He taught us that catering to all requires the ability to demonstrate everything convincingly; It is actually a basic principle in Metaphysics and is also a reasoning that runs through the whole book. Accordingly, there are a large number of examples, such as 1003a25 particularising mathematics as the 'Being' part by example. Besides illustrations, Chapters 7 and 8 of Book XIII discuss the units of the ideal number in a unique mathematical way. The geometric demonstration in 1051a21-29 is 'speaks mathematically' (995a7). 984b25-30, 1000a29-1000b15, 1009b19-25 and 1015a-4, 1076a7 are from Parmenides and Empedocles, Homer, which are the so-called 'to cite a poet as witness' (995a8). 'Demonstrations' in Metaphysics are not strictly like ones in a modern sense since they have no clear form without being reworked; hence, we need to rediscover and recognise them.
