Ways of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle's Metaphysics
By
Charlotte Witt (Author)
Hardback
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Description
Charlotte Witt continues her highly regarded exploration of Aristotle's metaphysics in a book devoted to the ontological distinction between potentiality and actuality. She focuses on Metaphysics book ix, which provides the most sustained discussion of this distinction. Witt rejects the conventional reading of this key text-that Aristotle differentiated between the two concepts solely to further the investigation of substance. Instead, in an original interpretation of his work, she argues that his development of the distinction between "being x potentially" and "being x actually" allowed Aristotle to develop an intrinsically hierarchical and normative vision of reality.
For Witt, Aristotle's views about being shed light on his puzzling use of gender language in his descriptions of reality. This language has become an important issue for feminist scholars who have noted that in Aristotle's metaphysics of substance form is sometimes associated with the male, and matter with the female. Witt's interpretation that Aristotelian reality is intrinsically hierarchical and normative, but not intrinsically gendered, offers a new, important understanding of a controversial aspect of Aristotle's metaphysics. CPSIA choking or other US hazard warning - No California Proposition 65 hazard warning necessary
About the Author
Charlotte Witt is Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. She is author of Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation of Metaphysics VII-IX, also from Cornell, and coeditor of A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity.
More Details
- Contributor: Charlotte Witt
- Imprint: Cornell University Press
- ISBN13: 9780801440328
- Number of Pages: 176
- Packaged Dimensions: 152x229x21mm
- Packaged Weight: 454
- Format: Hardback
- Publisher: Cornell University Press
- Release Date: 2003-02-20
- Binding: Hardback
- Biography: Charlotte Witt is Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. She is author of Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation of Metaphysics VII-IX, also from Cornell, and coeditor of A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity.
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