The Activity of Being
Contents:
Aristotle conceives of substance as a kind of dynamic activity, not some inert quality. Substance is something actively being what it is. Kosman demonstrates how this insight significantly alters our understanding of a number of important concepts in Aristotelian thought, from accounts of motion, consciousness, and essence to explanations of the nature of animal and divine being. In this illuminating commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics , Aryeh Kosman argues that, far from freezing or reifying an ontology of Being or Beings, Aristotle thinks that 'to be' essentially consists of being engaged in substantial activity.
His Aristotle helps us understand how determinate beings--human beings, for instance--can nevertheless also be essentially engaged in further self-determining activity.
It is at once focused--on the concept of energeia , or activity--and wide-ranging, taking in Aristotle's ontology, natural science, zoology, psychology, and theology. It will be studied with profit not only by scholars in the field but also by students and non-specialist philosophers.
The Activity of Being in Aristotle's Metaphysics
It is, in short, one of the best available introductions to and overviews of Aristotle's metaphysical thought. David Bronstein, Georgetown University Aryeh Kosman 's The Activity of Being rewards careful reflection regardless of one's philosophical specialization; it has significantly changed the way I view this difficult subject matter.
This book is an original, far-reaching, and--this is quite rare--a largely correct reading of Aristotle's work, and it will help solidify the importance of activity to Aristotle's Metaphysics. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Read more Read less. Add both to Cart Add both to List. These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers. Buy the selected items together This item: The Activity of Being: Ships from and sold by Wordery Specialist.
- The Activity of Being — Aryeh Kosman | Harvard University Press.
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Kosman suggests, and rightly, that "the choice of substance as the primary mode of being is not as arbitrary and tendentious as it sounds. It is [ ousia 's] translation as substance that is the tendentious move" n3.
This can be heard, however, only if we attend to the word in its ancient sense, as what is most one's own -- not only one's property, though also that -- but more significantly, the conditioned habits of being what one really is. And yet, although this is the direction in which Kosman intends to follow Aristotle in order to demonstrate how ousia is further and decisively determined as energeia , that is, as a being-at-work "best construed," Kosman suggests, "as activity," nevertheless, he retains "substance" as a translation of ousia because it "has by now acquired such authority in its own right that it would be a mistake to abandon it" x.
Here, however, Kosman's hermeneutical eye seems perhaps too reverent, not of Aristotle, but of a misleading tradition of translation, however authoritative it has become. This deference to tradition is somewhat surprising insofar as Kosman in a number of other places rejects traditional renderings of Aristotelian terms precisely in order to understand in other words the dynamic thinking of Aristotle himself.
Indeed, it would not be hyperbolic to suggest that the entire essay depends upon the rejection of the traditional translations of energeia and dunamis as actuality and potentiality, respectively. These translations, Kosman reminds us, "lead us to think of realization as the making actual of a possibility. Rather than actuality and potentiality, Kosman rightly insists upon activity as the translation for energeia , and ability or capacity for dunamis.
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This shift in translation requires a shift in thinking away from an understanding of being as an entity, toward being as an activity. In attending to such subtle questions of translation, Kosman remains true to Aristotle's legomenological method, that is, to his recognition that the ways we speak about being provide access to the nature of being itself.
By shifting our ways of saying energeia and dunamis Kosman brings us further along the path Aristotle's own thinking travelled, for activity and ability direct our attention to ousia as the how of being, the manner in which it is at work being what it is. If Kosman sets us effectively onto the path upon which Aristotle's intellectual adventure in search of the meaning of being unfolds, moving from being as substance to being as activity, it proceeds, if not to a destination, at least to an articulation of being as divine.
In turning, in the last third of the book, to the question of divine being, Kosman suggests a reversal that enables him to develop an account of how Metaphysics XII, where we encounter the unmoved mover and the divine nature of the thinking of thinking thinking, ought to be read in connection with the middle books of the Metaphysics , where we encounter perceptible ousia in all its rich complexity. This reversal involves a particular way of ascribing divinity to what is divine. Kosman puts it this way:.
Instead of imagining ourselves discovering what is divine and then coming to see it as the principle of being -- of ousia -- think instead of coming to see that which is the principle of being as, just because it is the principle of being, divine. This seemingly simple reversal of perspective subtly shifts our attention to the divine nature of the natural world. It enables Kosman to read Metaphysics XII not as an account of the divine sub specie aeternitatis , but as an account of the world sub specie divinitatis.
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Metaphysics XII is not an articulation of the divine from the perspective of eternity divorced from the vagaries of temporal existence, it is rather an articulation of ousia in a different register, under the aspect of divinity. Thus, Kosman insists that the proper path of thinking is precisely the path the Metaphysics traverses, namely, from the world to its divinity, and not from the nature of the divine into the world.
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The Metaphysics pursues the traces of the divine by attending to the manner in which beings are at work being what they are -- an activity Aristotle calls ousia. Metaphysics XII, then, must be read as consistent with the middle books, but in the register of theology Thus, in framing the discussion of the unmoved mover, Kosman insists: This enables him to offer a compelling account of the continuity not only between the middle books of the Metaphysics and Metaphysics XII, but also of the strand of thinking about the first mover that connects the De Caelo , the Physics , and the Metaphysics.
Rather than falling into the traditional developmentalist reading that emerges from the notion that the first mover in the De Caelo is, unlike that found in the Physics and Metaphysics , itself in motion, Kosman proposes a more complex account in which "Aristotle's first mover remains a self-mover" He accomplishes this by arguing that the motive principle of the heaven described in the De Caelo ought best to be understood as the soul of the visible world of motion Aristoteles' Entdeckung des wahrhaft Allgemeinen.
Essays on Plato and Aristotle by Aryeh Kosman. Biondi - - Review of Metaphysics 68 3: Brentano and Aristotle on the Ontology of Intentionality. Aristotle on the Desirability of Friends. Aryeh Kosman - - Ancient Philosophy 24 1: Aristotle, The Pythagoreans, and Structural Realism.
An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology. Now, in an elegantly argued new study, Aryeh Kosman reinterprets Aristotle’s ontology and compels us to reexamine some of our most basic assumptions about the great philosopher’s thought. In a move of far-reaching consequence, Kosman explains. Understanding "what something is" has long occupied philosophers, and no Western thinker has had more influence on the nature of being than Aristotle.
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