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.

Aristotle's contribution to the sum of wisdom dominates all our philosophy and even provides direction for much of our science. And all effective debaters, whether they know it or not, employ Aristotle's 3 basic principles of effective argument that form the spine of Rhetoric: "ethos," the impact of the speaker's character upon the audience; "pathos," the arousing of the emotions; and "logos," the advancement of pertinent arguments.

Metaphysics is Aristotle's version of philosophy examining the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value. Aristotle argues that there are a handful of universal truths. Aristotle's works have influenced science, religion, and philosophy for nearly two thousand years. He could be thought of as the father of logical thought. Aristotle wrote: "There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses." He wrote that everything that is learned in life is learned through sensory perception.

Aristotle's teaching on the subject of happiness has been a topic of intense philosophical. Did he hold that happiness consists of the exercise of all the virtues, moral and intellectual, or that supreme happiness is to be found only in the practice of philosophical contemplation? The question is vital to the relevance of his ethics today. Anthony Kenny helped to set the terms of the debate a quarter of a century ago. Later, in his book The Aristotelian Ethics, he argued that Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics has no less claim than the better-known Nicomachean Ethics...