problematic and conceptuality of Suarez himself, Thomas, and therefore Aristotle, entered the modern era. In the most recent edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford, 1923), W. D. Ross says that chapter 10 “has little to do with the rest of book IX,”31 the theme of which is potency and act. And Ross says it is hard to decide between Bonitz and Jaeger. That is generally characteristic for Ross’s edition.
Jaeger himself, in his great book Aristoteles. Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung (1923),32 has fundamentally, if quietly, given up his early thesis and shifted to that of Bonitz, although without providing any reasons. Now the situation has gotten even more obscure, because at the same time Jaeger explicitly appeals to his own earlier book. Now he no longer talks about an appendage or a passage out of context. Rather, with Bonitz he says that Aristotle puts this chapter about truth “at a fitting place, namely between the end of the doctrine of potentiality and at the beginning of doctrine of the actuality of the supersensible, which was intended to follow immediately”; and “[this insertion, which likewise must have been made on the occasion of the introduction of Ζ–Η–Θ,] clearly shows once again Aristotle’s attempt to arrange a gradual ascent up the scale of being to immaterial essence.”33 Earlier he had brusquely dismissed the idea of a gradual increase in ontological content. The turn-about is explained by the fact that Jaeger is now attempting to reconstruct Aristotle’s basic development. Why truth is a “level of being” and even of “act” is just as unclear here as it was in his earlier work, when he claimed there was no gradual increase in ontological content.
So Jaeger’s clarification of the question has not gotten any further than did Bonitz or Thomas Aquinas. The uncertainty about whether this chapter can be assigned to the ensemble of the other chapters, and the obscurity of justification, [174] are merely an index of the fact that the problematic of being and its elementary connection with the phenomenon of truth are basically not understood. Before advancing vague philological conjectures about how these texts belong together on the basis of their content, it is requisite that we first understand phenomenally the inner connection between the interpretations of being and truth. That is, we must philosophically master the relevant content of these problematic texts. I have intentionally introduced these discussions so as to make it clear, first, that the understanding of
31. [Aristotle, Metaphysica, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924; 2nd edition, 1963), vol. 2, p. 274.]
32. [Werner Jaeger, Aristoteles. Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung (Berlin: Weidmann, 1923), pp. 211ff.; translated as Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, trans. Richard Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1934; 2nd edition, 1948), pp. 204ff.]
33. [Ibid., p. 212 / tr. 205. The bracketed words appear in Jaeger’s text.]