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Jensen, Anthony K. "One and Many in Aristotle's Metaphysics: Books Alpha-Delta (Review)". Journal of the History of Philosophy 48:2 (2010), 237-238. © 2010 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.


Edward C. Halper. One and Many in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: Books Alpha-Delta. Las Vegas-Zurich-Athens: Parmenides Publishing, 2009. Pp. xli + 524. Hardcover, $45.00.

Twenty years after the appearance of the first of his three-volume One and Many in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Edward Halper has produced his much anticipated prequel commentary on the opening books of the Metaphysics. Readers of the chronologically prior Central Books will not be disappointed here. The analytic detail, the remarkably comprehensive yet deftly critical attention to the vast history of Aristotle scholarship, the clarity and precision of compositional style—all hallmarks of Halper’s earlier work—are here in abundance as he works through his singularly sweeping vision of the unity of Aristotle’s book.

Halper’s central argument is that the problem of the One and the Many is Aristotle’s most crucial and pervasive concern in the Metaphysics. While Aristotle himself never declares this—not even in those passages on the Presocratic philosophers where this problem features most prominently—Halper argues convincingly that Aristotle’s conviction about the possibility of a science as determined by a necessary degree of unity among the objects it studies must itself assume the solvability of the One and Many problem. As explicated in the Posterior Analytics, any science must be able to fully explain the first principles of the genus it treats if it is a science at all. If metaphysics is a legitimate scientific study, then it follows that its content must evince a suitable degree of unity such that it could be understood under a single scientific heading. Yet there is no single characteristic, as Aristotle himself claims, that all beings share commonly. As such, it seems as if there should not be a single science that could consider the highest principles of all things, which would mean, in turn, that there should be no science of metaphysics.

In this way, the problem of the One and Many is no mere historical curiosity among Presocratic philosophers. Its solution is, in fact, the precondition for the possibility of that same inquiry. Aristotle’s metaphysics must, then, determine its own nature by working through the subject matter it treats. And this, Halper explains in a dizzyingly thorough analysis of the text, Aristotle does accomplish provisionally in Book Gamma by introducing the notion of a pros hen genus (299–307). Being turns out to be the unifying nature of all beings rather than a single common characteristic shared by them: “The ‘nature’ common to every being, that is, being qua being, is simply its having some sort of essence” (480; his italics). Thus, “having an essence” is conceived as the unifying nature of all beings. Accordingly, beings are sufficiently one so as to permit inquiry into their first principles within a single science. Therefore, the conclusion of the “science-he-seeks,” which hinged on the solution to the One and Many problem, will of itself justify the possibility of pursuing that same science.

Halper’s view of unity has important consequences not only for the content of Aristotle’s views, but also for our own interpretive strategies. Scholars who overlook the One and Many problem—and most do—have obscured the compositional unity of the book. Excepting notable names like Sachs and Madigan, the great majority of twentieth-century scholars have doubted the coherence of the Metaphysics on the grounds that the oft-noted inconsistencies and repetitions present either a patchwork of notes or else the developing thoughts of an “artist at work” (32–38). Operating within either hermeneutical framework, these scholars have failed to see that the unifying theme of the book is in fact Aristotle’s concern about unity itself. The Metaphysics certainly does contain oddities and aporiai, which Halper, rightly, does not dismiss. He insists instead that, when the text as a whole is read with a mind to the problem of One and Many, Aristotle should be interpreted as attempting to resolve those aporiai in a dialectical way. Instead of presenting established conclusions, Aristotle engages in active philosophical thinking by pursuing this single problem through all its possible manifestations in a series of steps that hone and refine his final position on the pros hen unity of Being (460). What seem at times like inconsistencies or badly arranged notes are actually Aristotle’s own attempts to exhaust the totality of possible incorrect answers to the One and Many problem. While this conclusion may not be a convincing approach to every inconsistency, it is both a novel and well-defended solution to the longstanding problem of the Metaphysics’ internal coherence.

This incredibly detailed and difficult book will reward any reader of the Metaphysics. When complete, the three-volume set will rank among the most influential contemporary interpretations of Aristotle’s thought.

Anthony K . Jensen
CUNY / Lehman College




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