Aitiology

Admittedly Aristotle's remarks are not conducive to the appreciation of the capacity of a work like The History of the Peloponnesian War to illuminate the aitiology of the events reported, and, if taken out of context, they may indeed give the impression that he does not distinguish between a mere chronicle of facts whose relations are purely temporal, and a form of historiography that aims to bring to light causal patterns of human events.

Reale came to the attention of the Anglophone world through his work The Concept of First Philosophy and the Unity of the Metaphysics (SUNY Press, 1980), which elegantly undermined the Jaegerian thesis on the development of Aristotle's metaphysical thought by showing that the four dimensions, or strands, of Aristotle's thought on metaphysics (ousiology, aitiology, ontology, and theology), although conceptually distinct, interpenetrated one another in a fruitful manner which gave length, breadth, and depth to his treatment of metaphysics, or first philosophy.