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Aristotle’s Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Martin Tweedale
Martin Tweedale*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E1
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Extract

Although there are a very few occasions on which Aristotle speaks of words, on the one hand, or mental concepts, on the other, as universals, he was no nominalist and no conceptualist. This negative thesis I have argued sufficiently, at least to my own satisfaction, in an earlier paper. He was, rather, a realist, but of a very tenuous sort. As I said in the earlier paper, he viewed universals as real entities but lacking numerical oneness; each is numerically many, and yet each is also one in some sense. The specific identity of numerically distinct particulars creates something like a class, and this is the universal.

This interpretation was not, in the earlier paper, defended against those who would attribute to Aristotle a much more robust form of realism, and it is that defense which this paper will undertake to provide. The evidence which can be marshalled for the more robust realism is impressive – more so, I would say, than that which can be brought forth for either the nominalist or the conceptualist interpretations. It rests on numerous passages which either explicitly or implicitly seem to tie together as identical, forms, substances, universals, and intelligible objects.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , September 1988 , pp. 501 - 526
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1988

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References

1 Cat. 5, 2a19-27; Met. I 10, 1058b29-30; De An.B5, 417b18-28; Post. Anal.B 19, 100a5-9

2 ‘Aristotle's Universals,’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 65: 4 (1987) 412-26

3 The translations in this paper of bits of Met.Z depend heavily on an unpublished translation of the whole of the book by Michael Frede.

4 Liverpool: Francis Cairns 1981

5 998a20-b4

6 998b4-11

7 998b17-28

8 999a17-23

9 999a24-32

10 1086b32-1087a10

11 999b5-8

12 1003a5-17

13 Met.Z 8, 1033b5-19; B 5, 1002a30-b11; Δ 17, 1022a7-10; E3: 1027a29-30

14 Met.Z 15, 1040a8-27

15 De An.A 4, 408b1-18

16 Accordingly we assume that the primary substances of the Categories are synola, ignoring the fact that this would contradict the principle stated there that substances do not admit of more or less. It is forms, not synola, which accord with this principle, as we see from Met.H 3, 1043b33-1044al4.

17 My thanks to Steven De Haven for bringing this point horne to me.

18 See Hartman, E. Substance, Body and Soul: Aristotelian Investigations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1977), 17Google Scholar.

19 Met.M 10, 1087a10-25; Pr.An.B 21, 67a8-30; Post. Anal.A1, 71a17-b8; A 24, 86a22-30

20 Post.Anal.B 19, 100a5-9

21 See Matthews, G. ‘Accidental Unities,’ in Schofield, M. & Nussbaum, M.C. eds., Language and Logos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982) 223-40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Matthen, M. ‘Greek Ontology and the “Is” of Truth,’ Phronesis 28: 2 (1983) 113-35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a closely related approach see Hartman, 73-5.

22 I take it that Aristotle countenances two basic sorts of predication, kath hauto and accidental, and that the difference is just this: in the former the predicate does not refer to anything that is distinct even definitionally from the subject; to define one will be to state all or part of what it is to be the other. In the latter defining one does not contribute in this way to defining the other. The crucial text here is Post. Anal. I, 22, 83a24-31. Naturally, then, kath hauto predication does not entail that there is anything different in being from the subject of that predication.

23 Passages of this sort have been noted in White, N.P. ‘Origins of Aristotle’s Essentialism,’ The Review of Metaphysics 26 (1972) 57-85Google Scholar. See esp. pp. 71ff.

24 My predicative particulars to some extent play the roll of what Hartman calls ‘unit properties’ (see Hartman, 14). The controversy over whether Aristotle himself is committed to such entities is famous. See in particular Owen, G.E.L. ‘Inherence,’ Phronesis 10 (1965) 97-105CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Allen, R.E. ‘Individual Properties in Aristotle's Categories,’ Phronesis 14 (1969) 31-9Google Scholar. Predicative particulars differ, however, in two ways from unit properties: (1) Unit properties are primarily related to particular substances by being present in them; predicative particulars are primarily related to particular substances by their corresponding universal's being predicated of those substances. (2) One and the same unit property by defintion cannot belong at one time to one substance and at another time to another; there is no such restriction on a predicative particular, although it certainly cannot belong to more than one substance at a time. (For a reason to believe that non-substantial particulars can transfer from one subject to another see De Gen. et Cor., I, 4, 319b15-24, discussed in White, 73-6.) My own tentative view is that Aristotle does not subscribe to unit properties even in the Categories, but he does subscribe to non-substantial particulars of some sort in all his works, and in nearly all texts outside the Categories he thinks of these as predicative particulars.

25 See Kung, J. ‘Can Substance be Predicated of Matter?,’ in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 60 (1978) 140-59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.