Sylvain Delcomminette, Aristote et la nécessité. Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin (coll. “Tradition de la pensée classique”), 2018, 645 p.

The stated goal of this book is to reconstruct Aristotle’s philosophy on the crucial assumption that it is a coherent whole even though it has been transmitted to us in a form that betrays later interventions and several layers of interpretation. There is no need to return to the vexed question of the gap that exists between the Aristotelian corpus and what Aristotle may have left behind in the form of more or less polished lecture notes, let alone to recall the various ways in which the interpreters of Aristotle’s thought have tried to fill this gap. What matters here is that the book under review is best understood as a vindication of the working assumption that this thought does not consist in a series of loosely connected investigations but displays a remarkable unity and coherence. A quote from the general introduction will help the reader appreciate the overall project attempted in the book as well as the ambition of its author : “[…] pretending to reconstruct Aristotle’s thought in its coherence is certainly not to deny its richness by reducing it to two or three fundamental propositions, but rather to seek to rediscover the heart that animates it in order to breathe life back into this thought” (p. 16-17, my translation). For Sylvain Delcomminette (hereafter Delcomminette), the heart that animates Aristotle’s philosophy is the concept of necessity. His study of necessity becomes the springboard for an ambitious reorganization of this rich and complex philosophy. With the exception of the Politics, Rhetoric, and the Poetics, virtually all the major works transmitted under the name of Aristotle are approached and discussed from the vantage point of what they can teach us on the topic of necessity. The volume offers an impressive tour de force in which large and difficult questions are thoroughly re-examined. Among them, I recall the solution offered to the problem of the so-called future contingents (chapter 4 : “Le nécessaire et le statut des modalités”) ; the meaning of the terminus technicus “analysis” as a key to understand the project attempted in the Analytics (chapter 5 : “La démarche analytique”) ; the significance of the claim that the conclusion follows of necessity from the premises in Aristotle’s syllogistic (chapter 6 : “Nécessité et raisonnement”) ; the thesis that science consists of what is necessary (chapter 7 : “La nécessité dans la théorie de la science”) ; the equation of eternity and necessity (chapter 8 : “Modalités et temporalité”) ; the claim that the source of this necessity is found in the first principles of a science, with a detailed account of how we discover those principles (chapter 9 : “La connaissance des principes propres de la science”) ; the sense in which we find necessity in the realm of becoming via a study of final causality and hypothetical necessity (chapter 10 : “Nécessité et contingence dans le devenir”) ; the nature and object of Aristotle’s metaphysics (chapter 11 : “Nature et objet de la Métaphysique”) ; the status of the principle of non-contradiction and its elenchic demonstration (chapter 12 : “Le principe de non-contradiction”) ; the overall argument of Book Zeta (chapter 13 : “Ousia et définition”) ; and the way in which the subsequent books contribute to the project of the Metaphysics (chapter 14 : “Vers l’unité des principes”). The last (shorter) section of the book is concerned with Aristotle’s ethical thought. It deals with the way in which moral responsibility requires the contingent rather than the necessary (chapter 15 : “Le problème de la responsabilité morale”), attempts a rapprochement between practical …