ABSTRACT
I would approach Aristotle with much greater trepidation than I do if it were not for two things. One is a comforting remark made by an Aristotelian scholar of some repute. He said that he considered Aristotle the best of all philosophical disciplines because the student would be forced by the obscurity of the text to think out the problems for himself and would thus escape servility of mind. The other reason is that I have a problem well enough defined at the start to guide me through that terrifying jungle whence so few Aristotelian scholars have returned. In addition the enforced limits of my research and that incompetence, amounting to innocence, that I have retained throughout a fairly long training in philosophy may prevent me from being tempted by the way to leave my methodological problem for the enjoyment of speculative metaphysics.
