ABSTRACT
Science and philosophy in the mid-twentieth century have contributed in extraordinary measure to almost every field of human endeavour. The enthusiastic ones tend to exclaim with finality that all philosophy is but a series of footnotes on Plato or scholia on Aristotle. Numerous generations have misconstrued Aristotle, partly because of the inaccessibility of his works, partly because of the inability to evaluate and understand his real philosophical merits. According to Aristotle, the contraries are principles in two senses. First, they are physical points marking the extremities which delimit the entire life process of an individual substance and, therefore, they mark any given change present in a substance. Second, the contraries, as the termini of every change can be generalized and stated in discourse and as such they are principles of understanding, generic concepts, employed in the analysis of any determinate process whatever.
