Maria Varlamova. On the unity of being as the subject matter of first philosophy in Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Vol. 2. No. 1/2. 2017

Publication Details

On the unity of being as the subject matter of first philosophy in Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics
*Title in the language of publication:*	О единстве сущего как предмета первой науки в комментарии Александра Афродисийского на «Метафизику» Аристотеля
*Author:*	Maria Varlamova PhD in Philosophy, Research Fellow at the Research and Education Center for Religion, Philosophy, and Culture Studies at St. Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation, Associate Research Fellow at the Sociological institute of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Address: 67A Bolshaya Morskaia str., Saint-Petersburg, 190000, Russia. E-mail: boat.mary@gmail.com
*Issue:*	ESSE: Studies in Philosophy and Theology. Vol. 2. No. 1/2. 2017. P. 289–305.
*Language:*	Russian
*Document type:*	Research Article
*Acknowledgments:*	The present study is a part of the project No. 16-03-00047, “The followers of John Duns Scotus in the XIVth–XVIth centuries Scholasticism: Problems of Epistemology and Metaphysics”, implemented with a financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.
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Abstract

The paper deals with the problem of the unity of being in Alexander’s Commentary of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and considers the question about the unity and possibility of the first philosophy as the study of being qua being. Aristotle denies that the being is a single genus for all reality and insists that the universality of being transcends any universality of genus. If the being is not a genus then it is not univocal but equivocal, from which follows that being qua being cannot be the subject matter of any science. Alexander demonstrates that the unity of being is not equivocal because all the parts and categories of being which is said in many ways depends on the universal nature of being, and shows that the nature of being is the substance (ουσία) which is the universal principle of unity.

Keywords

Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aristotle, sameness, one, many, being, essence, metaphysics.

References

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