ARISTOTLE

FOOTNOTES
  1. I wonder if this is a deliberate pun. Here he is talking about ‘final’ causes; but what he says is that this is the final, or last of the four kinds of cause in the order he has presented them. The Greek word telos is used in both senses as in the very next sentence.

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  2. The Greek is ousia, which elsewhere I usually translate as ‘being’.

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  3. The Greek is eidos, which is also the standard term for ‘form’.
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  4. In Greek logos, in Latin, ratio.
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  5. The Greek is tode ti, and the Latin is hoc aliquid — literally ‘some individual this thing.’ To refer to it, Duns Scotus coined the term haecceitas, or ‘thisness’.

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  6. The Greek is to poion, or ‘the what-it-is-like.’ In Latin, Cicero coined the term qualitas, which has exactly the same meaning, and from which is derived the English ‘quality’. Here I have avoided using the word ‘quality’, in order to preserve the flavour of the original, and the parallel with ‘thisness’.

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  7. The Greek is ousia, which elsewhere I often translate as ‘being’.
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  8. The three he mentions explicitly are three of the four traditional elements. As so often with Aristotle, the examples of bodies compounded of them are organic, and surprisingly they include spirits.

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  9. The Greek is tode ti, and the Latin is hoc aliquid — literally ‘some individual this thing.’ To refer to it, Duns Scotus coined the term haecceitas, or ‘thisness’.
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  10. This seems to be the wrong way round, since it only makes sense to say that the parts of a solid body are a stack of plane surfaces, and the parts of a plane surface are lines laid side-by-side. Nevertheless, some philosophers have argued that you can’t have a two-dimensional surface without a three-dimensional body of which it is a surface, or a line without a surface which constitutes its thickness.
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  11. He is probably thinking of Pythagoras and Plato, for whom number was the basis of everything; but it is also trivially true that an individual thing cannot be a single individual, or composed of so many parts, without number.
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  12. This is Aristotle’s standard phrase for ‘form’ or ‘essence’
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