This book investigates Aristotle’s views on abstraction and explores how he uses it. In this work, the author follows Aristotle in focusing on the scientific detail first and then approaches the metaphysical claims, and so creates a reconstructed theory that explains many puzzles of Aristotle’s thought. Understanding the details of his theory of relations and abstraction further illuminates his theory of universals. Some of the features of Aristotle’s theory of abstraction developed in this book include: abstraction is a relation; perception and knowledge are types of abstraction; the objects generated by abstractions are relata which can serve as subjects in their own right, whereupon they can appear as items in other categories. The author goes on to look at how Aristotle distinguishes the concrete from the abstract paronym, how induction is a type of abstraction which typically moves from the perceived individuals to universals and how Aristotle’s metaphysical vocabulary is "relational.’ Beyond those features, this work also looks at how of universals, accidents, forms, causes and potentialities have being only as abstract aspects of individual substances. An individual substance is identical to its essence; the essence has universal features but is the singularity making the individual substance what it is. These theories are expounded within this book. One main attraction in working out the details of Aristotle’s views on abstraction lies in understanding his metaphysics of universals as abstract objects. This work reclaims past ground as the main philosophical tradition of abstraction has been ignored in recent times. It gives a modern version of the medieval doctrine of the threefold distinction of essence, made famous by the Islamic philosopher, Avicenna.

In this book, Theodore Scaltsas brings the insights of contemporary philosophy to bear on a classic problem in metaphysics that stems from Aristotle's theory of substance. Scaltsas provides an analysis of the enigmatic notions of potentiality and actuality, which he uses to explain Aristotle's substantial holism by showing how the concrete and the abstract parts of a substance form a dynamic, diachronic whole.

"In the context of mathematics, Aristotle uses the term "abstraction" (aphairesis) to refer to the act of ignoring or disregarding matter and change from perceptible objects in order to isolate their specifically mathematical characteristics as distinct objects of thought. Aristotle's frequent use of the terminology of abstraction in mathematics has led many to identify Aristotelian abstraction with its mathematical usage. I argue, however, that abstraction, as it occurs in mathematics, is simply a narrower, technical application of a more general notion of abstraction which can be found throughout the Topics and other works of the Organon—viz., that of ignoring or disregarding any aspect of an item for the purpose of considering that item without the aspect one is disregarding. Furthermore, Aristotle tells us that mathematicians reach their objects of study by considering things only "qua quantitative and continuous" (i.e., just in respect of being countable and extended), and that this involves ignoring or disregarding whatever is incidental to items considered in this way. Thus even in the context of mathematical thought one ignores (or "abstracts") matter and change because they are incidental to the objects of mathematical study, not because abstraction is limited to ignoring matter and change. Moreover, Aristotle thinks that we can consider virtually anything "qua F" (e.g., "qua extended", "qua being", "qua female"), and since any act of considering something "qua F" involves ignoring or disregarding what is incidental to being F, I argue that abstraction is a cognitive act of general application. It remains unclear whether Aristotle regarded abstraction as having a role in concept formation generally. I show that there is evidence in Aristotle's psychological and biological writings which suggests that abstraction is a component of the inductive process by which we reach universal concepts. The evidence this thesis, however, is not conclusive. Although Aristotle had the resources with which to construct a theory of general concept formation in which abstraction plays a key role, he does not appear to have gone through with this project."--Page ii.

This is a book about Aristotle's philosophy of language, interpreted in a framework that provides a comprehensive interpretation of Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology and science. The aims of the book are to explicate the description of meaning contained in De Interpretatione and to show the relevance of that theory of meaning to much of the rest of Arisotle's philosophy. In the process Deborah Modrak reveals how that theory of meaning has been much maligned.