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A Note on Aristotle's Principle of Non-Contradiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Montgomery Furth
Montgomery Furth*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA90024, U.S.A.
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Extract

In what follows I will say little if anything about the animadversions vis-à-vis Irwin and Lukasiewicz and Owen, because there is so much of such greater interest in what Code has told us about Aristotle, the great preponderance of which, in my opinion, is true (that is, true about Aristotle). I will review some of this truth, specify one place where I have trouble reconciling his account with the evidence, and then try to give a better account that I think is entirely compatible with the rest of what he has given us.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , September 1986 , pp. 371 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1986

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References

1 DA ii 4 415a23-b7, 416b11-20, GA ii 1 731-b24-732a1, 735a13-26

2 Dancy, R.M. Sense and Contradiction (Boston: Reidel 1975), 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 An interesting and (as far as I can tell) too-little-attended case for the thesis that the argument requires that the ‘one thing’ be the essence of a substantial kind, is made in Anscombe's Aristotle essay in Three Philosophers (Oxford: Blackwell 1961). 41-2. Contra, Dancy, 107-15.

4 The second conjunct is not stated explicitly, but is what I infer to be the line intended on the question ‘whether Socrates and essence of Socrates are the same’ (Zeta 61032a8). Namely, No, Of Course Not. For the essence ‘of‘(2-3) Socrates is, of course, the essence ‘of’(2-1) Man. That essence is certainly determinative of Socrates in highly important ways, but it and Socrates cannot possibly be the same thing. The general outlook on Zeta 6 that is sketched here (and described at greater length in my impending book on Aristotelean substances). though reached independently and different in several ways, seems generally compatible with Code's in ‘On the Origins of Some Aristotelian Theses about Predication’ (Bogen, and McGuire, eds., How Things Are: Studies in Predication and the History of Philosophy, Boston: Reidel 1983Google Scholar).

5 ‘Transtemporal Stability in Aristotelean Substances,’ journal of Philosophy (1978), see 627-32; reprinted in The Philosopher's Annual, 2 (Rowman and Littlefield: 1979), see 91-4.