This is the latest addition to a new series offered by Vrin and titled ‘La Métaphysique d’Aristote.’ The series provides new translations and extended commentaries of the 14 books of the Metaphysics in 14 separate volumes. So far, the publications do not follow the initial order of the Metaphysics: Δ first launched the series in 2014,^{Footnote 1} E was published last June, and the release of H is scheduled for September 2015.

Besides the translation, the present book contains an introduction (7-61), a substantial commentary (77-204), a thematic bibliography (205-223), two glossaries and two indexes. Since the commentary contains philological remarks, one may regret the absence of the Greek text.

Enrico Berti describes his translation as “très traditionnelle” (very traditional, 58) because he adopts the long-established translations of Aristotle’s technical terms (‘essence’ for τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι, ‘accident’ for συμβεβηκός, etc.). He acknowledges that new translations might sometimes be more accurate (explanation rather than cause for αἰτία), but argues that his faithfulness to history enables the reader to identify the vocabulary discussed and transmitted by the philosophical tradition. The translation is somewhat wordy. If expansion is occasionally inevitable, many words introduced in angle brackets are superfluous (e.g., 1027a32, b4, b16, b24) or could have been avoided by choosing other formulations (e.g., 1025b25, 27a20), hence preserving the concision that characterizes Aristotle’s writing style. One sentence or two are odd sounding, like the concession ὁμοίως δὲ κἂν ὑπερπηδήσῃ τις εἰς τὰ γενόμενα, at 1027b6-7, in which the verb ὑπερπηδήσῃ is translated too literally (“même si quelqu’un saute dans les choses passées,” my emphasis). Chapter 2 provides some examples of awkward phrasing mostly because the treatment of the modal terminology lacks efficiency (e.g., 1026b5-7, b34, 27a5-6).

Some translation choices remain open to question. Berti renders the word διάνοια by ‘pensée rationnelle’ (rational thought), stressing that the adjective ‘rationnelle’ highlights that διάνοια does not describe any kind of thought. Indeed, the De Anima and the Ethics depict διάνοια as a specific type of thinking that combines images (φάντασμα) and proceeds by reasoning rather than by intuition. Yet, those specificities would be better captured by the adjective ‘discursive,’ a translation previously adopted by J. Tricot and more recently by A. Stevens.^{Footnote 2} ‘Rationnelle’ also has the inconvenience of suggesting the existence of another sort of thinking that would not be rational, which does not fit with the rest of Aristotle’s psychology (thinking is the prerogative of the rational part of the soul alone). The confusion is made obvious by the translation of ἐπιστήμη διανοητικὴ by “science rationnelle” (1025b6) where ‘rationnelle’ is at best redundant. The few weaknesses of the translation are minor, however, since the main value of the book lies in the commentary.

E is among the most influential and widely-read books of the Metaphysics, despite its briefness—about three pages in the Bekker edition (1025b3-28a5). It owes the most part of its notoriety to its first chapter. In E 1, Aristotle makes a famous division between productive, practical and theoretical sciences. The latter includes physics, mathematics and what Aristotle calls the ‘science of being qua being’ (‘metaphysics’ is coined long after Aristotle’s death). E 1 is the only place where that ‘science of being qua being’ is also referred to as ‘first philosophy’ (πρώτη φιλοσοφία) and as ‘theological’ (θεολογική). The two epithets have generated a prodigious amount of discussion, from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Martin Heidegger. The millenary debate gravitates around two main issues: can ontology (the study of being in general) be reduced to theology (the study of the supreme being), and what is the exact meaning of ‘first’ in ‘first philosophy.’

Berti offers answers to both questions in a meticulous line-by-line commentary. A large portion of it exposes the relatively recent controversies (second half of the 19th century and after) surrounding the interpretation of E. At some point, the reader may get the impression that Aristotle scholarship is the focus of Berti’s attention rather than the text itself, and that the rest of the Corpus Aristotelicum is exploited to the extent that others refer to it. The pages that present Berti’s own analysis are often more engaging and contain many convincing arguments (e.g., about the universal understood as a cause rather than as a predicate (126-128)).

The emphasis on the history of the reception of E probably is the defining characteristic of Berti’s approach in this work. The importance given to the scholarly tradition shapes the commentary and accounts for the orthodoxy of the translation. Therefore, the volume may not succeed in providing a renewed encounter with the Aristotelian text, but should prove very useful to a specialized readership.