Abstract
Many of Aristotle’s theoretical terms, like ‘form’, ‘actuality ’, ‘substance’ and ‘cause ’, have the formal features of relations: they have correlatives, and statements about them have the conversion that Aristotle finds characteristic of relata . This is no accident: in this way Aristotle can treat, say, the form of an individual substance as if it were a being in its own right without the danger of relapsing into Platonism . Moreover, as substance alone does not have this co-dependence on its accidents, thereby it has primacy of being. Understand the ‘accidents’ here as ‘individual accidents ’, like ‘this-here whiteness’. This quality does not exist; rather its concrete paronym , ‘this-here white’ does, but only as a complex of the individual quality with the substance.
Universals are parts of individuals. Certain universals constitute their essences, as the genus animal is a constituent of the individual substance Socrates . No universal is a substance; even genera and species are so only secondarily. Likewise, the matter and form of an individual substance may constitute it, but only as its parts, which cannot exist independently, qua parts. Still, like relata , they may be treated as if they were independently. Abstract paronyms like rationality exist only in substances where they form complexes with them so as to produce the correlative concrete paronyms .
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Notes
- 1.
I find it ironic for them to have the name ‘predicable’ at all. For Aristotle does not recognize them in his list of predications (“categories”).
- 2.
Still cf. Metaphysics 1040b16–1040b27; Simplicius , in Phys . 463, 7–9 on ‘principle’.
- 3.
The distinction is between what is complete and what is incomplete. Cf. Brown 1986: 68–9. See Owen 1957: 172–3 for a fuller discussion of this distinction and its later history in the early Academy. Cf. Frede 1967: 16–29. Reeve 1985: 54–5, surveys different interpretations of ‘
’ and ‘
’, and finds two main camps: (1) the distinction amounts to that between a one-place and a two-place predicate [Cornford
, Malcolm
, Vlastos
] (2) “the complement of the verb ‘to be’ either does not import something different from the subject, or does import something different from the subject [Owen
, Frede
, Heinaman
, Reeve
].” See too Bostock
1984, nn. 2 & 20, on the secondary literature. - 4.
Take ‘relational ’ along the lines of Barwise and Moss 1996: 12: A set R is a relation if every element of R is an ordered pair. Relational structures are “pairs (A,R), such that A is a set, and B is a relation on R.” A function (or map) is “a set f of ordered pairs with the property that if <a,b> and <a,c> belong to f, then b = c.” “For any sets c and d, there is a set → d of all functions from c to d.”
- 5.
As discussed in Chap. 3, there is a problem with categories like position, action and passion. These seem fully relational . Indeed some commentators subsume them under relation .
- 6.
- 7.
Aristotle takes what has primacy to have priority . Cf. Cat. 2b3–6; Metaph. 1019a1–4; Peramatzis 2011.
- 8.
- 9.
Cf. the use of ‘accident’ in Metaphysics V.7.
- 10.
Some senses of parts that he distinguishes concern only quanta , and I leave them aside here. [Metaph. 1023b12–5; 1023b32–4; 1052b17–22; 1052b31–5] See Bäck 2010. I shall focus on substances and on his distinction between structured wholes and unstructured totalities . Koslicki (2008: 122–5) champions some of Aristotle’s views on parts today.
- 11.
Simplicius , in Phys . 551, 32–3: “Also every genus is predicated synonymously of all the species, but the whole only of the homoiomeres, and of those not in virtue of being a whole.”
- 12.
Aristotle does distinguish these two cases. Perhaps the difference with the prior sense comes from ‘nose’ not being strictly a constituent, the genus or differentia , of the definition of ‘snubness’.
- 13.
He has more extensive discussions of these distinctions of wholes also when he discusses ‘one’ in V.6 and X.1.
- 14.
However Simplicius suggests that the whole is the totality of its parts for intelligible substances having no partitioning while it is not that totality for corporeal things. [in Phys . 560, 32–561, 10]
- 15.
Harte 2002: 279. “…the identification of this wooden object as a chair leg is in some way dependent on the role it could play in the constitution of a chair.” Here there is an ontological and not an epistemological dependence.
- 16.
However Fine (1993: 21, n. 6) says that Plato did not use ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ thus and that Aristotle invented these uses of these terms.
- 17.
Offhand ‘universal’ and ‘individual’ (
) or ‘singular’ (‘
) do not seem relational
: they do not fit well into Aristotle’s conversion scheme: *‘a singular is a singular of some universal’; ‘an individual is an individual of some universal’. Here the English may obscure. Or, rather, Aristotle might be using ‘singular’ to emphasize the primacy of individual substances
over universals. ‘Individual’ has a more complicated history as it is tied to Plato
’s account of division: an individual is something that cannot be differentiated further by more universals. - 18.
Bäck 2000: 178–85. Frege objects to this strenuously, as it confuses the UF and UO relations.
- 19.
This, perhaps, is the point that Howard Robinson (1983: 129) is trying to make—obscurely! (Nussbaum 1984: 207)—about the relation of body and soul , the matter and form of a human being: “it is not the man who is the sailor who stands to the boat as form to matter, but the man qua sailor. The individual substance , the man, can exist without a boat, but the man qua sailor exists as such only from his relation to the boat.”
- 20.
Because they are parts.
- 21.
- 22.
Lewis (1991) at times comes dangerously close to this position, and says (279–81) that the end product ends up being something with three dimensions. Charlton (1970: 138) and Schofield (1972: 97–101) do not. Still Lewis (1991: 151) ends up saying that Aristotle makes forms the primary substances . Cf. Loux 1991: 12, n.4; Inciarte 2005 on Lewis 1991: 196ff., especially 197, n. 45.
- 23.
Despite the efforts of Joan Kung et al., Aristotle rejects the claim that the substance is not predicated of matter in Metaphysics VII.3. See Bäck 2000: 87–96.
- 24.
Owens (1981: 35–40) suggests: not ‘the matter is a stone’ but perhaps ‘the matter is lapidized’.
- 25.
So too Lorenz (2006: 151, n. 3) suggests that Aristotle thinks of the “parts of the souls” as aspects—to avoid there being more than one soul .
- 26.
- 27.
We might dispute this. Still Aristotle assumes a correspondence between what we can know in the past and what is possible, as is evidenced in his principle of plenitude.
- 28.
Spontaneous generation will present a problem, the same as the one about the potentiality of the rock to fall.
- 29.
Some complications arise in the modal syllogistic.
- 30.
From this Kosman (1984: 123) claims that the kinesis-energeia distinction is the key to understanding Aristotle’s ontology.
- 31.
Cf. Bäck 2003.
’ and ‘
’, and finds two main camps: (1) the distinction amounts to that between a one-place and a two-place predicate [Cornford
, Malcolm
, Vlastos
] (2) “the complement of the verb ‘to be’ either does not import something different from the subject, or does import something different from the subject [Owen
, Frede
, Heinaman
, Reeve
].” See too Bostock
) or ‘singular’ (‘
) do not seem relational
: they do not fit well into Aristotle’s conversion scheme: *‘a singular is a singular of some universal’; ‘an individual is an individual of some universal’. Here the English may obscure. Or, rather, Aristotle might be using ‘singular’ to emphasize the primacy of individual substances
over universals. ‘Individual’ has a more complicated history as it is tied to Plato
’s account of division: an individual is something that cannot be differentiated further by more universals.References
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Bäck, A. (2014). Aristotle’s Buddhism. In: Aristotle's Theory of Abstraction. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 73. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04759-1_9
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