L16-01-28-14

1. L16-01-28-14 • Announcements (rerun) • First midterm will be distributed this Thursday. It will be due a week from SATURDAY (i.e., you will have 9 days). • Briefly, you can discuss this with your discussion group, but don’t ask any of us in conference to go over the assigned passages with you: we have to grade them. • There will be very specific rules for submission: attend to them carefully. The assignment will be very specific. • Grading will be on a letter grade basis (A, A-, B+ and so on). Weighting (for Identification, and for the commentaries (2)) will be clearly indicated, and you will get detailed comments on your work. • These are revisable, but we will not read drafts. Revisions must affect the argument you are making: cosmetic or minor tinkering will lower your grade.

2. Aristotle Aristotle is following Plato, so when you find that he comes to a different conclusion or works in a different way, this is Nachfolge,SUCCESSION. Keep track of what problem in Plato he is solving, what mess he is cleaning up, so as to measure accurately what he is doing and where he is going. So: Aristotelian division is related to Plato’s diaeresis, but it is quite differently focused, for substantive reasons.

3. Dividing by DIFFERENTIA In Categories, it is clear that Aristotle is dividing words, not things: a statement or affirmation depends on combining words, so the division of them depends both on attributes of the subject of the sentence, and the function of the words combined with the subject. Dividing a sentence, then, depends on recognizing that the subject (the name of a substance or individual thing) has certain attributes, but the predicate has a distinct grammatical and cognitive function. The grammar involved here is not language specific (i.e., it is not identical to Greek grammar), but empirical / philosophical: a “lizard” in Greek “σαύρα ” or “lezard” in French or “Eidechse ” in German or “蜥蜴 ” (xīyì) in Chinese is still a lizard.

4. The categories as functions The analysis of combined words (sentences) depends on notional grammatical functions, a level of significance that is anterior to definition or grasping of integrated intelligibility (crudely, meaning) Quantity:count Quality: attribute Time: when (w verb)* Relation: compared to Location: spatial Position: orientation Possession: separable thing Action: performance Affection: suffer a result In terms of language, these predicates approximate grammatical case relations. * note: in class, time was inadvertantly omitted: 9 in all

5. Aristotle’s target Distinguish a concrete object, a thing, an entity, from an idea or form, so as to discern exactly what the form, the eidos, the configuration of typical aspect of the thing actually is. Note here that Aristotle is deflating Plato’s EIDOS εἶδοςthat which is seen: form, shape, appearance to ordinary usage, precisely to illustrate the connection between the ordinary thing and its εἶδος, as its kind or nature. Without this move, the intelligible is simply hypostatized (ὑπό under στᾰτικός bringing to rest) as if it were another thing, entity, or object. The conceptual difficult is that this duplicates the object and does not explain what it is.

6. Substance, οὐσία • οὐσία , one’s own property, true nature, essence (derived from ousia) • For Aristotle, the primary substance is the actual, empirical, individual thing: Socrates, this horse, that stone. • His objective is to specify exactly what properties, attributes, or powers that thing has or evinces, that will be indexical to its inherent nature: what IS it? • Thus the division of categories (Substance and the 8 normal predicates) both enables a simple analytical grammar: TOPIC + COMMENT, without the need (as yet) for a specialized vocabulary. • This is a practical ground for analysis: the “dispersed plurality” Plato sought to collect is here not all of the attributes or associations there may be with a word like “SOPHIST”—where Plato’s problem is that he has already made up his mind that the Sophist, like the Rhetorician and the Poet are poisonous frauds and ignorant liars, who nevertheless influence the politics and the ethics of the state—but the much more rudimentary task of describing objects such that you can collect all the attributes in common among a plurality of individual things, to produce a FORMULA that specifies what will count as X. • Thus, SECONDARY SUBSTANCE consists of an ordered list, where the ORDER follows the sequence, first Individual, then Species, then Genus.

7. Ackrill, p. 7: substance, species, genus •  It is clear from what has been said that if something is said of a subject both its name and its definition are necessarily predicated of the subject. For example, man is said of a subject, the individual man, and the name is of course predicated (since you will be predicating man of the individual man), and also the definition of man will be predicated of the individual man (since the individual man is also a man). Thus both the name and the definition will be predicated of the subject. For example, animal is predicated of man and therefore also of the individual man; for were it predicated of none of the individual men it would not be predicated of man at all. Again, colour is in body and therefore also in an individual body; for were it not in some individual body it would not be in body at all. Thus all the other things are either said of the primary substances as subjects or in them as subjects. So if the primary substances did not exist it would be impossible for any of the other things to exist.

8. Cont’d + differentia • “For all the predicates from them are predicated either of the individuals or of the species. (For from a primary substance there is no predicate, since it is said of no subject; and as for secondary substances, the species is predicated of the individual, the genus both of the species and of the individual. Similarly, differentiae too are predicated both of the species and of the individuals.) And the primary substances admit the definition of the species and of the genera, and the species admits that of the genus; for everything said of what is predicated will be said of the subject also. Similarly, both the species and the individuals admit the definition of the differentiae. But synonymous things were precisely those with both the name in common and the same definition. Hence all the things called from substances and differentiae are so called synonymously.

9. The order is hierarchical • Starting with the individual, going up: species next, then genus: Genus-Animal Species-Man Individual-Callicles The differentia narrow the scope of inclusion: p.9: “one draws a wider boundary with the genus than with the species, for in speaking of animal one takes in more than in speaking of man.” What is predicated of the higher level is inherited by the next level down. What you predicate of “Animal” is also predicated of Man, and then of Callicles

10. Grounding the syllogism On this see, Lynn Rose, Aristotle’s Syllogistic ? Tree of Porphyry Plant Tree differentiae Maple Absolutely brilliant. Simple, but we have here the syllogism: necessary reasoning. Opinion has nothing to do with it. If all trees are plants, and all maples are trees, then all maples are plants

11. Otherwise: Class inclusion (Venn diagram) Why does the syllogism plants work? trees maple BECAUSE THERE IS COSMOS, ORDER, IN NATURE, AND IT IS HIERARCHICAL.

12. In the Analytics. . . • Posterior analytics: Aristotle discerns that in this element of the organon, the differentia predicated is distributed through the middle term. He even tries to make it physical, in lunar eclipses. • In Prior analytics: a stunning realization that the differentia and the predicates need not have a name since they are variables, best named by, you guessed it, ALPHABETIC LETTERS. If A is B, and all B are C, A is C: If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, Socrates is mortal. A=Socrates, B=Man, C=Mortal

13. Further. . . If the order we can follow in a syllogism is based on the order of nature, so too is our mental power inherent in nature. The ordering principle here without stating it as a syllogism provides a very powerful template for making order. Find the differentia, and examine its quantitative scope. You don’t need to build Plato’s ladder, climb up it, and then try to throw it away.