As the editor notes, Book Lambda is not an “organic part of this extensive work.” But that still leaves open the question of whether or not it is an organic part of a unified science whose establishment Aristotle evidently seeks. In that case, we are still left with the reconciling of theology and a perhaps more universal science of being. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that, even if we could determine that Lambda (or an earlier version of it) was written prior to the central Books, it is entirely possible that the Lambda we have was intended to fulfill or contribute to the fulfillment of the project announced in Book Epsilon, chapter 1. The second, which may or may not be solvable without solving the first, is whether or how the account of the Unmoved Mover in that Book fulfills the various programmatic statements made by Aristotle in other Books regarding the science of what is variously indicated by him to be concerned with “substance,” “wisdom,” “principles and causes,” “being qua being,” and “theology.” A subordinate problem, not the focus of any paper in this volume, is how the account of multiple movers in chapter 8 coheres with the account of the unicity of the Unmoved Mover in chapters 6, 7, and 9-10, but also in 8 itself. The first problem is glaringly evident in the seeming disconnect between chapter 1-5 on the one hand, and 6-10 on the other. Among the many problems that have always faced students of this text, the two central issues concern the internal unity of the Book and its place within the Metaphysics as a whole.

The present volume is a solid addition to the many valuable contributions to the study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book Lambda seemingly inspired by the meticulous chapter-by-chapter commentary on that work by those participating in the Symposium Aristotelicum volume on Lambda edited by David Charles and Michael Frede (Oxford, 2000).

Aristotle metaphysics lambda