It is true that over a span of thirty-five years I have spent more time studying the philosophy of Aristotle than the philosophy of anyone, or anything, else. But Aristotle was not the original pull. It was my good fortune, at school and university, to have the chance to learn ancient Greek well enough to read Aristotle eventually; but my first encounter with him, I am not proud to say, was unexciting. It was an encounter, standardly the only one on offer when I read Greats at Oxford, with the Nicomachean Ethics. At the time this work seemed pedantic and prosaic by comparison with the Plato I knew from the Phaedo, the Republic, the Theaetetus, and the Sophist. However, literary and stylistic comparisons were not at that time the most pressing concern, because I was then discovering philosophy per se, and in particular acquiring an abiding fascination with the notion of causality. Hume's Treatise (although Hume is mentioned only twice in this volume) was a mighty stimulus. The first paper here, ‘Affecting and being affected’, responded to a causal question inspired by a passage in Plato's Sophist (248a–e): what stands behind the intuition that to know something is not ipso facto to affect it? Causal questions have shaped the majority of these papers, if one is allowed to include as expressing such influence the ones that discuss the idea of the summum bonum as good-maker (chapters 9, 10, and 11).