They treat such wonder at the mystery of being as philosophical nonsense, subjective mysticism, or mere superfluity precisely because it cannot yield a determinate answer. Many philosophers, for instance, dismiss wonder at the strangeness of anything existing at all. He moves beyond the modern tendency to focus on the determinate, on what can be pinned down in propositions. Perhaps we are struck by the face of a newborn child, the face of a lover, or the face of a suffering stranger.ĭesmond’s philosophy describes being’s abundance and affirms its worth. Perhaps we are struck by a starlit sky or by mote constellations suspended in a window’s light.

The strike of wonder (re)awakens us to this abundance and worth. Being manifests a worth that we did not put there, a worth that can move us to care. Dennis Vanden Auweele claims, “It is abundance that propels thought, not emptiness.” Desmond argues that being is excessive, “overdetermined.” It is more than we can take in. It wonders at the aesthetic richness of the world, at our own mysterious depths, at the strangeness of there being anything at all. In addition, the most important variant readings of the manuscripts are noted in footnotes underneath the translation.William Desmond’s philosophy begins in wonder. It is accompanied by a commentary dealing with the major philosophical topics, Averroes' sources and problems of the transmission and constitution of the text. The present translation is based on a wide range of documents including, apart from the available Arabic editions, a number of medieval Arabic manuscripts not taken into consideration in these editions as well as the Renaissance translation into Latin prepared by Jacob Mantinus.

The two most interesting things about this work are the fact that Averroes restructures here the Aristotelian text according to his own conception of metaphysics, as opposed to his great literal commentary which follows the order of the Metaphysics section by section, and that he constantly revised this work over more than three decades.

The original Arabic text was composed around 1160 as a sort of appendix to a series of compendia of Aristotle's works on natural philosophy by the famous Andalusian philosopher. This book contains the first English translation of Abūl-Walīd Ibn Rushd's (Averroes') so-called Epitome of Aristotle's Metaphysics.

Aristotle metaphysics best translation