“This is a book which there is no way of understanding.” This warning, given by the great 10th century philosopher and physician Ibn Sina [Avicenna], epitomizes the confusion and controversy that continues to plague readers of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Ostensibly it is a treatise on wisdom, the culmination of the striving for knowledge that is characteristic of all human beings. Wisdom, Aristotle tells us, is knowledge of “first philosophy,” the science of the primary and most comprehensive causes of things. But just what are these causes? Is first philosophy, as Aristotle at one point seems to tell us, the science of the attributes of “being qua being,” or being itself? Or is it theology, the science of God, the highest being of all, as Aristotle seems to tell us elsewhere, and as he was read by thinkers like Ibn Sina? This controversy drove Ibn Sina to reread the Metaphysics 40 times, even to commit the entire treatise to memory, before giving up in despair. Still thornier issues arise as readers wade deeper into Aristotle’s first philosophy. What is being, and why are things said to be in several ways? Is there a difference between the being of material things like plants and animals and the being of immaterial things like numbers and triangles? Is there a kind of being wholly separate from matter, such as a Platonic Form or a transcendent deity? What (if anything) is the connection between being and goodness?
In this course we will join the generations of readers who have sought to understand Aristotle’s Metaphysics only to end up more confused than when they began. Following Ibn Sina, we’ll frame our approach to the text around its aim or skopos. We’ll consider Aristotle’s discussions of the various problems of being from the point of view of first philosophy, asking how these accounts contribute to knowledge of the primary and most comprehensive causes of what is. Along the way we’ll seek the help of commentators from antiquity to the present, including, in addition to Ibn Sina himself, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Syrianus, Themistius, al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd [Averroes], Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, W. D. Ross, Myles Burnyeat, Michael Frede and Günther Patzig, Jennifer Whiting, and Julia Annas.
