Abstract

The present book is concerned with a problem of the concept of essence in Aristotle's Metaphysics 7-9. Charlotte Witt does not intend, as she points out already in the "Introduction", to discuss the three books of the Metaphysics comprehensively: "I have not intended to level all the serious philosophical problems and issues of interpretation that abound in Aristotle's text". Rather, she takes on a standard interpretation of Aristotle's theory of essence in Metaph. 7-9. It is an essentialistic interpretation which is sustained by a contemporary element of essentialism, as represented by Saul Kripke, and explains the Aristotelian theory in this way, that the essence is the counterpart of a definition of the thing in question, as a species-holder. Thus it is a universal essence shared by all members of the same species, which Witt calls a "species-essence." The individuality of the things would be due only to the matter. The essence has the character of a universal property of the things or substances which share in it, and finally of their matter.