Abstract

Against the view promoted by Joseph Owens, in particular, that Aristotle's Metaphysics is coherent but incomplete, inasmuch as the promise advanced in the "programmatic treatises" , to account for the existence of the sensible world, is never redeemed, the present dissertation will be an attempt to show that the Metaphysics is also complete. ;As the argument develops, the obligation will be incurred, to find fault with the view recently articulated by Sarah Waterlow, that: ;...[W]e shall find no answer in Aristotle...if what is being demanded is justification for holding that natural objects are such as to change in certain ways, as opposed to holding that they usually do so change...[H]ow Aristotle would have dealt with a Humean attempt to undermine a basic presupposition of science, we cannot easily guess. ;Against this view, the attempt will be to show that Aristotle's "basic...presupposition of science" is a mediated theorem of science instead, for which a justification can not only be demanded but found, in Metaph. Books Gamma and Z