THE PROBLEM OF THE NAME AND THE UNITY OF THE CORPUS OF ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS

Abstract

The article addresses the problem of the name and the textual unity of the corpus of Aristotle’s Metaphysics – a question that has not received systematic treatment in Ukrainian-language Aristotelian scholarship, despite its foundational character for understanding this work. The topic’s relevance is grounded in the publication of the complete Ukrainian scholarly translation of the Metaphysics, rendered from Ancient Greek on the basis of W.D. Ross’s edition, which made possible a direct engagement between the Ukrainian philosophical tradition and the original Greek text without the mediation of Russian translational and commentary traditions. The aim of the article is to substantiate three interrelated theses: the expression τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά admits of at least three complementary dimensions of interpretation – epistemological, textological, and ontological; the corpus of the Metaphysics, considered as a whole, is not a single work composed according to an overarching plan; individual fragments of the text contain «gestural» deictic expressions best explained by the hypothesis of oral transmission recorded by Aristotle’s students. The methodology combines philological and historical-philosophical analysis of the original Greek text with a comparison against the corpus of extant translations of the Metaphysics into various European languages, together with a critical engagement with recent Aristotelian scholarship. Main results: the three dimensions of the interpretation of τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά are systematized; Hans Reiner’s hypothesis regarding the origin of the title is examined in comparison with V. Terletskyi’s critique; it is shown how the «ontological» line of interpretation acquired a decisive character, rooted in Aristotle’s own texts and further developed by Kant; the textological and structural heterogeneity of the corpus is demonstrated, rendering unconvincing the hypothesis of a single overarching plan. The scholarly novelty of the study lies in an original observation: the corpus contains deictic expressions such as ἐπὶ τοῖσδε (“for these”), ταῦτα (“these”), ὡδί (“in this way”), which are much more naturally accounted for as records of oral instruction taken down by a student than as the product of purely written authorship. This argument supplements W. Jaeger’s classical genetic hypothesis with a generic dimension – a distinction, within the extant corpus, between authorial texts, preparatory notes, and students’ lecture records.