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Aristotle’s kinêsis/energeia Distinction: A Marginal Note on Kathleen Gill’s Paper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alexander P.D. Mourelatos*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX78712-1180, USA

Extract

I am grateful to the editors of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for inviting me to write a comment on Kathleen Gill’s ‘On the Metaphysical Distinction Between Processes and Events’ (above, 365-84). I readily concede that she is right in the central criticism she makes of my 1978 paper: that a properly metaphysical or ontological distinction between processes and events, if it is to be made at all, cannot be sustained on the basis of the informal linguistic criteria I offered in ‘Events, Processes, and States.’ My main concern in that paper was to show that discussions (back then) of the Kenny-Vendler typology of activities, performances (i.e., accomplishments and achievements, taken together), and states had focused too narrowly on verb types, on adverbial phrases, on the domain of human action, and on English-language intuitions. Mine was one of several voices urging in the late 1970s that issues of tense logic and of the logic of verb types had to be placed in the broader context of verb aspect — a salient and pervasive structure in natural languages generally, and one that had been studied by philologists and linguists since the nineteenth century. Captivated, as I and others had become at the time, by evidence that the distinction between count nouns and mass nouns appears to be mirrored in verb predications, I went on to make some rather venturesome ‘ontological’ claims. It is satisfying, of course, that Gill accepts not only that there is ‘substantial evidence in favor of recognizing a grammatical distinction between the language of processes and [the language of] events’ (369) but also that ‘similarities with count and mass expressions will allow us to apply techniques for han dling nominal expressions to verbal expressions’ (368). It is more than satisfying that the phenomenon of verb aspect is now noticed and investigated by philosophers as well as by linguists.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1993

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References

1 I borrow the terms ‘autotelic’ and ‘heterotelic’ from a somewhat different (sociological) distinction developed by the logician Anderson, Alan R. and sociologist Moore, Omar K.. See their ‘Autotelic Folk Models,’ The Sociological Quarterly 1 (1960) 203-16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also their ‘Some Puzzling Aspects of Social Interaction,’ Review of Metaphysics 15 (1962) 409-33.

2 Graham, Daniel W.States and Performances: Aristotle’s Test,’ in The Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1980) 117-30CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Comrie, Bernard Aspect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976), 58-9Google Scholar; cf. Graham, 125

4 The exact tense-parallel in Greek to the English ‘I am walking and I have walked,’ is badizô kai bebadika, where the perfect form would take on (rather confusingly) the sense ‘I am done with walking.’ In order to translate into Greek the experiential perfect ‘I have walked’ we must shift to the simple preterite (aorist), ebadisa, which, however, now carries the implication ‘I did a stretch of walking.’

5 Graham, 117, translates ‘actualization.’

6 Graham is certainly aware of both of these points, even though he does not dwell on them in his paper.