Ways of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle's Metaphysics / Edition 1

by Charlotte Witt

Overview

Charlotte Witt continues her highly regarded exploration of Aristotle's metaphysics in a book devoted to the ontological distinction between potentiality and actuality. She focuses on Metaphysics book ix, which provides the most sustained discussion of this distinction. Witt rejects the conventional reading of this key text—that Aristotle differentiated between the two concepts solely to further the investigation of substance. Instead, in an original interpretation of his work, she argues that his development of the distinction between "being x potentially" and "being x actually" allowed Aristotle to develop an intrinsically hierarchical and normative vision of reality.

For Witt, Aristotle's views about being shed light on his puzzling use of gender language in his descriptions of reality. This language has become an important issue for feminist scholars who have noted that in Aristotle's metaphysics of substance form is sometimes associated with the male, and matter with the female. Witt's interpretation that Aristotelian reality is intrinsically hierarchical and normative, but not intrinsically gendered, offers a new, important understanding of a controversial aspect of Aristotle's metaphysics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801440328
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	02/20/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charlotte Witt is Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. She is author of Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation of Metaphysics VII-IX, also from Cornell, and coeditor of A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	1
Chapter 1	Aristotle's Defense of Dunamis	17
Chapter 2	Power and Potentiality	38
Chapter 3	Rational and Nonrational Powers	59
Chapter 4	The Priority of Actuality	75
Chapter 5	Ontological Hierarchy, Normativity, and Gender	97
	Notes	119
	Bibliography	147
	Index	153

What People are Saying About This

Theodore Scaltsas

This unique book on Aristotle's metaphysics discusses Aristotle's theory of value and connects it in a very illuminating way to contemporary feminist critical readings of Aristotle's metaphysics. This connection is interesting, revelatory, and original.

Editorial Reviews

"This unique book on Aristotle's metaphysics discusses Aristotle's theory of value and connects it in a very illuminating way to contemporary feminist critical readings of Aristotle's metaphysics. This connection is interesting, revelatory, and original."

Theodore Scaltsas

"This unique book on Aristotle's metaphysics discusses Aristotle's theory of value and connects it in a very illuminating way to contemporary feminist critical readings of Aristotle's metaphysics. This connection is interesting, revelatory, and original."—Theodore Scaltsas, University of Edinburgh

From the Publisher