This essay attempts to uncover the ideology of form that operates in an unquestioned way in much philological scholarship concerning Aristotle’s thinking. Drawing on four different interpretations of form in Aristotle, that of Joseph Owens, Edward Halper, Michael Frede and Günter Patzig, and Michael Loux, this essay attempts to show the manner in which Aristotle’s logos concerning being in the Metaphysics reflects its own conditioned finitude. This emphasis on the finitude of the Aristotelian logos opens a way to articulate the ideological tendencies endemic to the attempt to think being in terms of form. The essay concludes with an account of ontological justice as an attempt to address the individuality of the individual as such without reducing it to particularity, a mere instance of the coercive universal.
Long, Christopher. “Between the Universal and the Singular in Aristotle.” Telos 126, (2003): 25-40.
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