This work deploys an elegant analogy suggesting that, like bats which cannot process blinding sunlight with their blind eyes, so too does the truth elude us.
This work deploys an elegant analogy suggesting that, like bats which cannot process blinding sunlight with their blind eyes, so too does the truth elude us. Translators baffled by this work's phrase "the what it was to be" rendered the whole thing as the word essentia, from which we get the English word "essence." This work arbitrarily defines a human being as a two-footed animal in order to demonstrate the impossibility of believing the same thing to be and to not be, in an extended illustration of the principle of (*) non-contradiction. In his autobiography, Avicenna claimed to have read this work 40 times without understanding it before encountering al-Farabi's elucidation of its "purposes." Book XII, or lambda, of this work terms a being whose "thinking is a thinking of thinking" the "unmoved mover." For 10 points, name this work by Aristotle which gives its name to the field of philosophy concerned with the nature of being, with a title suggesting that pupils should tackle it after reading his Physics.
This work deploys an elegant analogy suggesting that, like bats which cannot process blinding sunlight with their blind eyes, so too does the truth elude us.
Metaphysics