Doing and Being
confronts the problem of how to understand two central concepts of Aristotle's philosophy:
energeia
and
dunamis
. While these terms seem ambiguous between actuality/potentiality and activity/capacity, Aristotle did not intend them to be so. Through a careful and detailed reading of
Metaphysics
Theta, Beere argues that we can solve the problem by rejecting both "actuality" and "activity" as translations of
, and by working out an analogical conception of
. This approach enables Beere to discern a hitherto unnoticed connection between Plato's
Sophist
and Aristotle's
Theta, and to give satisfying interpretations of the major claims that Aristotle makes in
Theta, the claim that
is prior in being to capacity (Theta 8) and the claim that any eternal principle must be perfectly good (Theta 9).