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Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle's Physics treats time as the number of motion with respect to before and after — substantival in the sense of being a real measurable feature of the cosmos. The Ethics inherits this and adds the requirement of a "complete life" for eudaimonia (1098a18): virtue's activity has to extend through time, not just flash in a moment. Time is non-deterministic in the practical sphere — Aristotle is one of the earliest defenders of genuine human deliberation under open futures (NE III.3, on deliberation about means).

Nicomachean Ethics

Not thematised in the Ethics, but the cosmological background is the finite, geocentric, Aristotelian universe — substantival in the sense that place (topos) is the boundary of the surrounding body, real and measurable. The polis, as the natural setting of the human good, is a real spatial community.

Nicomachean Ethics

The hylomorphic background is presupposed: every concrete substance is form-in-matter. The human being is the rational animal — a body informed by a rational soul. Matter is real, substantival, and conserved across hylomorphic transformations.

Nicomachean Ethics

The Aristotelian observer is embodied, plural, active, and capable of theoretical and practical reason. Knowledge is built up through experience — "the eye of the soul" comes only with time and habituation (1144b14). The metaphysical agency is cosmic-ordering: there is an Unmoved Mover at the apex of the cosmos (Metaphysics XII), but it is not a personal providence in the Abrahamic sense, and the Ethics treats it largely as a limit-case to which the contemplative life aspires (1177b34).

Nicomachean Ethics

Energeia — actuality, activity — is Aristotle's technical term for the realised state of a substance. The Ethics makes a moral use of it: eudaimonia is *activity* (energeia) of soul, not a static state. Energy in the modern thermodynamic sense is not present, but the framework of actuality / potentiality is the ancient ancestor of every later dynamic ontology.

Nicomachean Ethics

The forms are substantival informational structures, conserved across the cosmos' regular cycles. Personal information is not conserved across death in the Ethics: Aristotle is famously reticent about personal immortality, and the text's treatment of friendship across death (1100a18–b22, on whether the dead can be affected by what happens to the living) leaves it open whether the deceased survive as agents.