Journal of the History of Philosophy

Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 (2002) 536-537

Book Review

The Myth of Aristotle's Development and the Betrayal of Metaphysics

Walter E. Wehrle. The Myth of Aristotle's Development and the Betrayal of Metaphysics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Pp. xiii + 279. Cloth, $75.00.

Walter Wehrle was a clever scholar who struggled all his life with a crippling illness that led to his death at the age of forty-nine. His widow, with the help of a friend and colleague, David Schum, saw this posthumous book into print.

Wehrle focuses on one argument line used by some of those who have theories of Aristotle's development: Aristotle says different things about ousia in the Categories and in the Metaphysics, especially Zeta and Eta, and that, say the developmentalists, can be explained by taking the Categories as an early composition, and Metaphysics Zeta and Eta as the expression of the mature metaphysical position. Wehrle's objective is to show that this argument is seriously mistaken: mistaken about Categories, mistaken about Metaphysics Z and H, and mistaken about the character of Aristotle's metaphysics. Wehrle singles out Terry Irwin (Aristotle's First Principles, 1990) and Daniel Graham (Aristotle's Two Systems, 1987), but he also takes passing shots at Russell Dancy, Mary Louise Gill, Michael Frede, and G. E. L. Owen, and others. He acknowledges the work of J. D. G. Evans (Aristotle's Concept of Dialectic, 1977) and Robert Bolton (several articles) as fundamental for his approach (42).

Wehrle does not say much in the work that would touch other arguments used by some who believe in Aristotle's philosophical development—for example, he has nothing to say about the Nuyens thesis that Aristotle's theory of the soul changed over time. So the title of the book promises more than it can deliver. A modest formulation of his thesis would be: "If Aristotle's philosophy developed over time, the supposed differences between Categories and Metaphysics don't tell you anything about that development." [End Page 536]

Wehrle was convinced that the modern understanding of "metaphysics" is very different from Aristotle's understanding, that the emphasis on "ontology" robs the science of metaphysics of much of its content (257). But the emphasis on ontology also leads modern readers to construe the Categories as a "metaphysical" work because it appears to address ontology. That, thinks Wehrle, is the root of the mistake. The Categories, as the ancient commentators recognized, is "logical, not ontological . . . semantical, not metaphysical" (167). That is, the Categories is a book about language, period. In Wehrle's opinion, "for Aristotle, the only genuine metaphysical question is, Given that things exist, what are the causes of their being?" (199), and the Categories does not address that issue.

The central focus of the book might also be construed as an interpretation of Metaphysics Zeta and Eta as "architectonic," deploying the distinction between logik¯os and analytik¯os to dispel any impression that Aristotle contradicts himself within the space of Zeta and Eta alone, and thus remove another motivation for a developmentalist account. By "bracketing" the passages where Aristotle is explicitly talking logik¯os, he can maintain that Aristotle's consistent positive objective in the central books of the Metaphysics is to develop a "causal" account of being. In this connection, I think that it's interesting that Wehrle ignored another "unitarian" interpreter of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Giovanni Reale, whose book, The Concept of First Philosophy and the Unity of the Metaphysics of Aristotle (trans. 1980), anticipates some of Wehrle's arguments, and presents a richer and more nuanced picture of the Aristotelian metaphysics.

It is unfortunate that no one asked a competent classicist to check the proofs before printing this volume. Wehrle included quite a lot of Greek—individual words and short phrases—in his text, and a very high proportion of it has come out wrong in this printing; accents and breathing marks are more or less haphazard, and terminal sigmas often come out as a smooth breathing on...