This excursus began with a reading of segments from the Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics. Through these texts, first philosophy, that is, the investigation of conditions, emerges as essentially informed by considerations regarding at once sensibility and action (aisthēsis and praxis). In this context, Aristotle delineates the intertwinement of perceptual and practical motifs in its phenomenal or even phenomenological character.

The Main Section is devoted to an analysis of Nicomachean Ethics Alpha to Zeta and related texts. Aristotle's discussion of ēthos, far from a circumscribed and secondary discipline, is progressively disclosed as involved in casting light on primordial structures – of nature, human nature, first origins, final causality. The ethical treatises interrogate those altogether embodied and practical matters in which any human inquiry, including the “science of wisdom,” is rooted. In this way, they make explicit and articulate the awareness of the non-scientific ground of science.

The Interlude returns to the Metaphysics, most notably to the discussion of the so-called principle of non-contradiction in Book Gamma. It aims to show at work what was previously observed regarding the intellectual virtues (particularly, intellect and wisdom) in their inseparability from the virtues pertaining to character and action. Far from being a “metaphysical” law, the principle of non-contradiction is shown in its genuinely physical traits, as that which informs what is – as that which informs being in its becoming and acting.

The Concluding Section focuses on Nicomachean Ethics Theta to Kappa, the discussions of friendship and the good.