Causality and Causal Explanation in Aristotle

Aristotle's writings about causality and its relation to natural science are at the heart of his philosophical project, and at the origin of a 2,000-year history of inquiry into these topics.Yet for all the work done on various aspects of his thought, there has been no full-length philosophical study of his theory of causality, and some basic questions about it remain under-examined.For example, it is unclear, from what he and his commentators have said, (a) how Aristotle answers the main philosophical questions about causality to which he thinks his predecessors' answers are flawed, and (b) how his answers bear on the main questions we confront in thinking about causality in general, such that those answers could be usefully critiqued, developed, and compared with others.Nathanael Stein's book addresses these two questions.It is not a survey of Aristotle's claims, but rather focuses on a set of key conceptual, metaphysical, and epistemological questions that are important both for und