The Common Books in General

The question about the common books was discussed in general terms in the Introduction. The conclusion there reached was that, as far as we can see from the text, the common books are genuinely common and were meant by Aristotle to be part equally of both EE and NE. None of the arguments against this conclusion, whether based on style or structure or content, is sufficient to overthrow the witness of the ancient tradition. For whether the style and structure of the common books are more like EE than NE, or like NE than EE, and whether there are tensions or inconcinnities or even contradictions between the common books and the other books of either treatise, no such facts prove that Aristotle either did not write them or did not intend them to be where they now are. Certainly contradictions prove nothing, for it is an established opinion among commentators that Aristotle contradicts himself or repeats himself or says things in tension with what he says elsewhere, even in books and passages that the same commentators hold to be really his and really in the form in which he left them. ¹ However, it can be shown that none of the alleged contradictions or tensions is really genuine (some evidence for the fact will be given below, and has already been given above about the other books of EE). Explanations and interpretations have long existed (going back to medieval and ancient times) that dissolve them. No doubt some of these explanations and interpretations are more persuasive than others, and no doubt the explanations and interpretations preferred by modern scholars, who analyze the inconsistencies in terms of Aristotle’s philosophical development or the incompleteness of his revisions or simple failure to notice, save the phenomena just as well. The point nevertheless is that, of the many hypotheses hitherto proposed by scholars, or yet to be proposed in the future, none of them, provided each does indeed save the phenomena, can claim superiority over the others. Since, ex hypothesi, all save the phenomena, all are compatible with the phenomena. The only one piece of evidence that does distinguish these hypotheses, and that does make some superior to others, is the evidence of the ancient tradition. For this tradition favors all and only those hypotheses that hold the common books to be both common and authentic. These hypotheses, therefore, by the right of reason and of sound methodology, should be adjudged superior to those that hold the opposite.