ABSTRACT

This book should not be read as a substitute for grappling with Aristotle’s often challenging philosophical texts. Beyond the obvious thought that no such substitute exists lies the more consequential consideration, equally obvious to seasoned Aristotelians though perhaps less immediately recognizable to novices, that much of what I claim Aristotle maintains will have had its credentials as authentically Aristotelian queried by someone or other in the long tradition of Aristotelianism. With now two and a half millennia of minute engagement with Aristotle – in the form of exegesis and explication, of appropriation and appeal to authority, and also of criticism and contumely – almost nothing beyond the barest summary of his work is uncontroversial.