Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volume 8, Issue 1, Fall 2003

Reading the History of Philosophy

The Ethical Culmination of Aristotle’s Metaphysics

This article suggests that Aristotle’s Metaphysics culminates not in the purity of God’s self-thinking, but rather in the contingent principles found in the Nicomachean Ethics. Drawing on such contemporary thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor Adorno, and Emmanuel Levinas, the article rethinks the relationship between ethics and ontology by reinvestigating the relationship between Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics. It is argued that the ontological conception of praxis developed in the middle books of the Metaphysics points already to the Nicomachean Ethics where a conception of knowledge—phronêsis—is developed that is capable of addressing the lacuna in the account of ontological knowledge offered in the Metaphysics.