Abstract

The article offers a new reconstruction of Aristotle's metaphysics, showing what place metaphysics occupies in the Aristotelian system of scientific knowledge, what its subject matter is, and into what parts it naturally divides. The author discusses in detail the Aristotelian doctrine of categories; his theory of essence; the doctrine of potential and actual being; explanatory model of four causes and the doctrine of the divine Intellect, in which metaphysics meets theology. In expounding the Aristotelian doctrine of essence, the author challenges the traditional view that the theory of essence in the Categories, where concrete things are recognized as essences in the strict and proper sense of the word, is radically different from the theory of essence in Metaphysics VII (Z), where essence is identified with form. The author shows that in both treatises Aristotle regards essence as identical with the concrete thing, but only in so far as it is taken without its accidental properties and reduced solely to the substantive ones.