This little book attempts to set forth what one man has found
to be the significance for the present day of the thought of the
second of the two major philosophers our so-called "Western"
civilization has managed to produce.

In the English-speaking world we have had in our generation
the chance to learn from some of the most distinguished scholars
in the long attempt to elucidate the text of Aristotle. In England
and the United States the leaders of this critical enterprise are
easily Sir David Ross and Werner Jaeger, whose contributions to
the study of Aristotle have been epoch-making. These eminent
classical scholars, however, have been primarily philologists;
philosophical analysis and interpretation of Aristotle's thought
has not been at the center of their concern. The same is largely
true of most of that band of Oxford Aristotelians whom J. A.
Smith and W. D. Ross originally gathered about themselves, to
make Aristotle a living force in a nonclassically trained century.
Of these perhaps H. H. Joachim was philosophically the most
penetrating.

This volume presents itself not as a philologist's but rather
as a philosopher's delineation of Aristotle. Of primarily philo-
sophical expounders of Aristotle in our century, there stand out,
in the English-speaking world, perhaps A. E. Taylor, Harold
Cherniss, Kurt Riezler, and Richard McKeon. But the first two,
like most of the great interpreters of Greek philosophy in the
last couple of generations, have approached it as Platonists.
Though a student and admirer of Plato, the present writer is

-iii-