Beta 6 Discussion of P12, P13, P14a (not listed in B 1).Beta 1 A list of the fourteen puzzles (P1-14) about primary starting-points and causes that need to be resolved.Little Alpha 3 The audience for the Metaphysics must already be well educated.Little Alpha 2 Arguments that there must be some starting-point or primary cause of beings.Little Alpha 1 The primary causes of beings are, as such, clear by nature, but our understanding of them is clouded.Alpha 10 Earlier thinkers touched only vestigially on the four causes and on none beyond them How to achieve a puzzle-free condition about these causes.Alpha 9 Criticisms of Plato and the Platonists.Alpha 8 Errors of the physicists, including positing elements of bodies only, though non-bodily ones are also beings, as the Pythagoreans recognized.Alpha 7 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.Alpha 5 The starting-points of mathematics as the starting-points of beings: Pythagoreans.Alpha 4 The moving cause: Hesiod, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Democritus.

Alpha 3 The four causes: formal, material, moving, final Earlier thinkers recognized the material cause: Homer, Hesiod, Thales, Anaximenes, Diogenes, Hippasus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Parmenides, Hermotimus.

Machine generated contents note: Alpha 1 Theoretical wisdom as a science concerned with primary causes and starting-points.

In addition, the most important variant readings of the manuscripts are noted in footnotes underneath the translation.

It is accompanied by a commentary dealing with the major philosophical topics, Averroes' sources and problems of the transmission and constitution of the text. The present translation is based on a wide range of documents including, apart from the available Arabic editions, a number of medieval Arabic manuscripts not taken into consideration in these editions as well as the Renaissance translation into Latin prepared by Jacob Mantinus. The two most interesting things about this work are the fact that Averroes restructures here the Aristotelian text according to his own conception of metaphysics, as opposed to his great literal commentary which follows the order of the Metaphysics section by section, and that he constantly revised this work over more than three decades. The original Arabic text was composed around 1160 as a sort of appendix to a series of compendia of Aristotle's works on natural philosophy by the famous Andalusian philosopher. This book contains the first English translation of Abūl-Walīd Ibn Rushd's (Averroes') so-called Epitome of Aristotle's Metaphysics.

Aristotle metaphysics book 4