The article considers the meaning of Aristotle’s οÙσία in the two key texts (“Categories”
1-5 and “Metaphysics-Z”) and then asks what is the best option for rendering οÙσία in
Ukrainian in this philosophical context. Translations “essence” and “substance” are
equally unsuccessful due to their inadmissible one-sidedness, and also because they both
impose on Aristotle the problems of post-Aristotelian philosophy. Contextual translation
corrects this one-sidedness at the expense of total loss of the original Aristotle’s term in the
translated text. This solution is admissible for an analytical description, but hardly for
translation of Aristotle’s texts. In Ukrainian, there is no lexical unit that would fit for translation
of οÙσία as semantic neologism. Rendering οÙσία by transliteration («усія», following
the precedents of Ukrainian «логос», «категорія», «агора» etc.) seems to be the least
traumatic solution for translation and commentaries to Aristotle’s texts.