This book concerns the ontological status of products of art (technê) in Aristotle, in particular material objects. It makes three main advances with respect to the existing literature: the first will be of interest to contemporary metaphysicians, the second to historians of philosophy, and the third to both contemporary metaphysicians and historians of philosophy. First, the metaphysics of artefacts is increasingly gaining the attention of contemporary metaphysicians, in particular among supporters of hylomorphism, who all refer to or draw on Aristotle. However, there is no consensus about the place of artefacts within Aristotle’s ontology; indeed, there is no consensus as to whether Aristotle articulates a single coherent account of artefacts in the first place. Hence, the first contribution made by this book is to offer a complete picture of Aristotle’s account of artefacts that is sensitive to current issues and that can therefore serve as a guide for the contemporary (neo-)Aristotelian debate. Second, when it comes to technê, historians of philosophy have primarily focused on the art analogy and Aristotle’s use of examples taken from the artificial realm.

This final chapter shows how further enquiry into artefacts’ metaphysics forces us to return to artefacts’ physics. At the same time, this further enquiry is in turn shown to fall outside the interests of a metaphysician and to be the task of a natural philosopher. For this reason, the chapter looks at artefacts as objects of inquiry and distinguishes between perspective of the natural scientist, the maker, and the user on the one hand, and the perspective of the metaphysician on the other. This discussion allows us to wrap up the results, to reassess the relationship between the Physics and the Metaphysics, and to evaluate the respective contributions of these works to Aristotle’s ontology of artefacts.