Abstract

The volumes of the 'Symposium Aristotelicum' have become the obligatory reference works for all studies on Aristotle. In this eighteenth volume a distinguished group of scholars offers a chapter-by-chapter study of the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Book Alpha is not just a fundamental text for reconstructing the early history of Greek philosophy; it sets the agenda for Aristotle's own project of wisdom after what he had learned from his predecessors. The volume comprises eleven chapters, each dealing with a different section of the text, a new edition of the Greek text, based on an exhaustive examination of the complex manuscript and indirect tradition, and an introduction which offers new insights into the relation between the two divergent traditions of the text.