Metaphysics
Decide its fate
The record
Time
An eveningA season352 pages, about 7 hours: about the length of a typical book on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climbAristotle begins with the claim that all humans desire to know, then surveys earlier philosophers’ accounts of causes.
What it gives
Plot and actionIdeas to live byIn 16 reviews from critics and book blogs, none credit the plot and 14 credit the ideas or a change in how they live.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else doesJoe Sachs’s Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry ties its inquiry into being to Plato’s Republic, on the shelf at 324 pages.
The case for it
on the endnotes
“Reeve’s notes are a gold mine for the researcher”
Matthew Duncombe · Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2016 on the Prime Mover
“his beautiful conclusions about what the Prime Mover of necessity is”
a book blog on the Middle Ages
“its speculative and complex nature, which shaped philosophical debates throughout the Middle Ages”
Karim Ayad · Blog of the APA, 2024 on the opening line
“The beginning is typically a very good place to start.”
a Substack review
The case against
on the work’s difficulty
“No editor of the Metaphysics is likely to suppose that he has solved all the outstanding problems of this desperately difficult work, and I am certainly free from that illusion. All I can hope to have done is to have cleared up some points left obscure by my great predecessor Hermann Bonitz.”
W. D. Ross · Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1924 on books 13 and 14
“two books full of endless quarreling over minor details of the Platonic doctrine of forms”
Joe Sachs, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on chapter 6
“Chapter 6 was too confusing for me”
a philosophy podcast on the obscure sections
“Many sections of the work are obscure, if not unintelligible”
a book blog
