Theoretical wisdom as a science concerned with primary causes and starting-points -- Wisdom as the science of god -- The four causes: formal, material, moving, final Earlier thinkers recognized the material cause: Homer, Hesiod, Thales, Anaximenes, Diogenes, Hippasus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Parmenides, Hermotimus -- The moving cause: Hesiod, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Democritus -- The starting-points of mathematics as the starting-points of beings: Pythagoreans -- Plato and Forms -- Earlier thinkers latched on to the material cause and moving cause, but not the formal one, although Plato touches on it, as do he and others on the final cause No one mentions any others -- Errors of the physicists, including positing elements of bodies only, though non-bodily ones are also beings, as the Pythagoreans recognized -- Criticisms of Plato and the Platonists -- Earlier thinkers touched only vestigially on the four causes and on none beyond them How to achieve a puzzle-free condition about these causes -- The primary causes of beings are, as such, clear by nature, but our understanding of them is clouded -- Arguments that there must be some starting-point or primary cause of beings -- The audience for the Metaphysics must already be well educated -- A list of the fourteen puzzles (P1-14) about primary starting-points and causes that need to be resolved -- Discussion of P1-5 -- Discussion of P6-7 -- Discussion of P8-11 -- Discussion of P14 -- Discussion of P12, P13, P14a (not listed in B 1) -- The science of being qua being introduced and contrasted with the special sciences -- Something is said to be in many ways, but with reference to one thing and one nature, making a science of it possible Tasks for the science of being qua being -- Getting a theoretical grasp on what mathematicians call axioms is one such task The most stable starting-point of all (PNC) introduced and characterized -- A defense of PNC in seven arguments (A1-7) -- Discussion of Protagoras' argument that man is the measure of all things -- The discussion continued -- Discussion of PEM -- Discussion of the view that nothing is true and of the view that everything is true -- Starting-point -- Cause -- Element -- Nature -- Necessary -- One -- Be -- Substance -- Same -- Opposite -- Prior and Posterior -- Capacity, Potentiality, Power -- Quantity -- Quality -- Relative -- Complete -- Limit -- On the Basis of Which -- Disposition -- Having or State -- Affection -- Lack -- To Have or Hold -- Of or From -- Part -- Whole -- Docked -- Genus or Race -- False -- Coincident -- The three theoretical philosophies-mathematical, natural, and theological-and the differences between the essences that are their starting-points -- Coincidental being and why there is no science of it What happens for the most part -- Starting-points of coincidental beings Luck -- Being in the sense of being true -- Substance as primary being What is being = what is substance -- Are there any substances beyond perceptible ones? -- A sketch of substance Substance as primary underlying subject Form as substance -- Logico-linguistic investigation of essence and definition -- Discussion of definition continued -- Discussion of essence continued: is each thing the same as its essence? -- Form in matter-form compounds -- Form in matter-form compounds continued -- Form in matter-form compounds continued -- Definition and its relation to form -- Form and its parts -- Definition again -- Are universals substances? -- No definitions or demonstrations of what is particular, and so none of Platonic Forms either -- Most of the things that seem to be substances-parts of animals, the four elements-are in fact capacities -- A fresh start on substance looking to its role as starting-point and cause -- Summary of Zeta -- Substance as activation of perceptibles -- Composite substances vs their activations -- The matter of composite substances -- How the matter of a thing is related to its contrary states -- What makes a definiens or a definiendum one? -- Potential being (capacities) -- Rational and non-rational capacities -- The Megarians on capacities -- Capacities and incapacities -- Capacities and their acquisition More on rational capacities -- Being as activity What activity is -- When a given thing is potentially something -- The priority of activity to potentiality -- Activity more estimable than potentiality Activity and potentiality in knowledge and understanding -- True and false being The case of incomposites Understanding and error -- The ways in which beings are said to be intrinsically one What the being for one is vs what things are one -- The substance and nature of the one -- The one and the many: same, similar, distinct (or other), different, contrary -- Contrariety -- Puzzles about how the equal is opposed to the great and the small -- Puzzles about how the one is opposed to the many -- Contraries and intermediates -- Distinctness in species -- Puzzles about distinctness and species The case of female and male -- Things capable of passing away and things incapable of doing so must be distinct in genus -- The puzzles from Beta revisited: P1-8 -- More puzzles: P9-16 -- Gamma 1-2 revisited -- Parts of Gamma 3 revisited -- Parts of Gamma 3 revisited -- Parts of Gamma 4 and 5 revisited -- Epsilon 1 revisited -- Epsilon 2-4 revisited -- Parts of Physics III recapitulated -- Parts of Physics III recapitulated -- Parts of Physics V recapitulated -- Parts of Physics V recapitulated -- Substance and its varieties -- perceptible and capable of passing away -- perceptible and eternal -- immovable The nature of change -- Matter and change Change from what is potentially to what is actively -- Coming to be and its causes -- The causes and starting-points of distinct things are in a way distinct and in a way the same-form, matter, lack of form, and the external moving cause -- More on the causes and starting-points of substances -- The need for an eternal immovable substance that is in essence an activity -- The unmoved mover and how it moves things The primary god -- The number of unmoved movers needed to explain astronomical phenomena Why there is one heaven -- The nature of the divine understanding The primary god as an active understanding of active understanding -- The relationship between the divine understanding and "the nature of the whole" -- Are mathematical objects and Platonic Forms or Ideas non-perceptible substances? Are they causes and starting-points of beings? -- The objects of mathematics cannot exist either in perceptibles or separate from them -- The way mathematical objects do exist -- The Socratic origins of the theory of Forms Alpha 6 and 9 partially recapitulated -- What the Forms contribute to perceptibles Alpha 9 partially recapitulated -- The consequences of taking numbers to be separable substances The views of Pythagoreans and Platonists -- Units and the consequences for Plato's account of making them combinable or non-combinable -- The views of Speusippus, Xenocrates, and the Pythagoreans Arguments against theories that treat numbers as separable intrinsic beings -- More such arguments Ideas as causes and starting-points of beings, and as both universal and particular -- Are the elements and starting-points of substances separable in the way substances themselves must be? The scientific knowability of substances as the greatest puzzle A resolution offered -- Contraries cannot be starting-points Consequences for those who make the one a starting-point together with some contrary -- Can eternal things consist of elements? Further difficulties for those thinkers who treat both the one and something else as elements How being can come from non-being, how it can be many -- The existence of numbers and mathematical objects -- How are these mathematical elements and the starting-points related to the good and the noble? -- More on this topic Just how are beings supposed to "come from" numbers? Other related puzzles -- More on numbers and the good Ratios.
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