Structure of Being in Aristotle’s Metaphysics

This text develops an interpretation of Aristotle's "Metaphysics". By exploring the significance of the long ignored distinction between being with regard to categories and being with regard to potentiality and actuality, the author presents Aristotle's science of being as having two distinct aspects: an investigation of the basic constituents of reality in terms of categories, predication, and definition, and an investigation which deals with change, process, and order of the world. The author argues that corresponding to the distinction between these two kinds of being, the central books of the Metaphysics contain not one, but two theories of substance, depending on whether the matter/form relation is associated with the potentiality/actuality relation. Together, these two studies of being and substance provide a complete picture of the Aristotle's world as both a static and a dynamic reality.