Some Comments on Prof. Enrico Berti’s “Being and Essence in Contemporary Interpretations of Aristotle”

Abstract

In his interesting and wide-ranging paper Enrico Berti makes a number of important exegetical claims. I shall mention a few of them:

• (a) Aristotle did not separate the existential from the predicative sense of ‘is’. One possibility is that Aristotle analysed ‘A exists’ (in the case of substances) as ‘A is one existent substance’. Alternatively, he failed to distinguish clearly between the existential and the predicative sense of ‘is’.

• (b) Since, according to Aristotle, the predicative sense of ‘is’ is multiple, it follows (given (a)) that ‘...exists’ will also have multiple senses.

• (c) For Aristotle, being is not a genus. (Prof. Berti proposes a new way of understanding one of Aristotle’s argument in favour of this claim.)

• (d) According to Aristotle, all senses of ‘is’ are to be defined in terms of the central, or focal, case: the being of substances.

• (e) However, it is not the case that the being of all substances is to be defined in terms of the being of a focal case of substance: that of pure actuality.

• (f) The relation between pure actuality and other substances is that of efficient causation.