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The Categories and Aristotle's Ontology1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Mohan Matthen
Mohan Matthen
Affiliation:
The University of Calgary
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Extract

What were Aristotle's aims in the Categories? We can probably all agree that he wanted to say something about different uses of the verb ‘to be’ – something relevant to ontology. The conventional interpretation goes further: it has Books Γ and Z of the Metaphysics superseding theories put forward in the Categories. We should expect then that the Categories and these books of the Metaphysics try to do the same sort of thing. Most exegetes do indeed ascribe to the earlier work fairly elaborate ontologies, though they are in disagreement as to what theory Aristotle held while writing it. I shall argue in this paper that the whole enterprise of reconstructing the ontology of the Categories from its small stock of clues is misguided; that the business of the Categories is to set out data for which the Metaphysics tries to account. This view is not without consequences relevant to some widely held theses. I shall claim that the differences between the Categories and the Metaphysics cannot uncritically be used to trace the development of Aristotle's ontology, that the differences between the two doctrines has been greatly exaggerated. More of this later: let me first explain the distinction on which I shall depend.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 228 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1978

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References

Notes

2 Owen's article, the main source on which I depend for this distinction, originally appeared in Aristote et les problèmes de méthode, Louvain, 1961Google Scholar and has since been anthologised in Moravcsik, J.M.E., Aristotle, Anchor, 1967CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in Barnes, J. et al. (ed.) Articles on Aristotle, Duckworth, 1975Google Scholar. Much the same distinction is made by E. Weil in his ‘La Place de la logique dans la pensée aristotélicienné’ (1951) which is translated in Barnes et al.

3 See Philoponus in Categorias CIAG vol. 13 part 1 pp. 10–11, and Simplicii in Categorias CIAG vol. 8 pp. 9–11. Simplicius quotes Alexander and Porphyry.

4 ‘Aristotle on Predication’, Philosophical Review 76 (1967), p. 90Google Scholar.

5 ‘On Some of Aristotle's First Thoughts About Substance’, Philosophical Review 84, (1975). p. 338CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 I am not, of course, claiming that Aristotle was able, when he wrote the Categories, to distinguish, in a theoretical or explanatory way, between substantial and non-substantial change. I make no claim about this either way. The combination of 3 b 24 – ‘Another characteristic of substances is that there is nothing contrary to them’ – and 4 a 10 – ‘It seems most distinctive of substance that what is numerically one and the same is able to receive contraries’ – provokes some reflections on the explanation of changes like death.While these reflections are not pursued in the Categories they presumably provide part of the content of an intuitive distinction between substantial change and qualitative change. That he takes there to be an intuitive distinction is evident from the bold assertion in De Gen. et Corr. Book I chapter I that his predecessors cannot account for the difference between the two kinds of change.

7 Owen, G. E.L., ‘The Platonism of Aristotle’. Proceedings of the British Academy 50 (1965). See p. 136 and note 9Google Scholar.

8 Dancy, Russell: Sense and Contradiction, Reidel, 1975, pp. 98–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Owen rejects, as un-Aristotelian, a similar sounding argument. It goes: If “Socrates is a man” is to be analysed ‘Socrates R Man’ where R is a relation, then all such statements would be relational rather than predicative. Owen rightly says that Aristotle does not have much of a notion of relations. But, as Owen admits, he knows what a relative is. Would he want Socrates to be a relative?

10 Ackrill, J.L.: Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione, O.U.P., 1963Google Scholar. Owen, G.E.L.: ‘Inherence’, Phronesis x, (1965), pp. 97–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 This is a desirable feature of my account: we have seen that some early commentators came to reject the view that these two are the only things investigatable.

12 ‘We speak’ = ‘We ordinarily talk.’

13 Ackrill: op. cit., p. 74.

14 There has however been considerable scepticism, since Ramsey's, F. ‘Universals’ Mind, xxxiv (1925), pp. 401–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, that this feature will serve to distinguish particulars from universals.

15 Moravcsik, op. cit., p. 89.

16 Though common, the reference to ‘the category of place’ appears to be mistaken, an indication of the degree to which a continuity has been assumed between the Categories and other works (e.g. the Physics). The only word which occurs in the various lists of the categories is ‘ποῖ’, where. The general form of an answer to ‘ποῖ’ is ‘ντινι τπῲ’, so that a τπος (a place) is not what is given as the answer to ‘ποῖ;’. This observation has two consequences. (1) Since ‘ντινι τπῲ’ is predicable but ‘τοπος’ is not, the reason why ‘ποῖ’ rather than ‘τπος’ appears in lists of categories must be that Aristotle was investigating predicables rather than things-as-such. (2) The following argument of Owen's is mistaken:

When‥ (Ackrill's)‥ dogma is extended to other categories‥ it becomes ajoke; so that two things cannot be said … to occupy the same particular place at different times. Aristotle's account of place in the Physics rests squarely on the assumption that A can move into the identical place vacated by B. (op. cit. p. 102)

The last observation is supposed to show that it is even more absurd to think that there is a “Socrate s's Lyceum” than to posit a “Socrates's pink” – the latter is claimed by Ackrill to be an individual in the category of quality. We now see that what Owen should have shown is that to posit a ‘Socrates's being-in-the-Lyceum’ is ‘ajoke’. Upon the question of whetherthis is true, Aristotle's account of place has no bearing. Nevertheless Moravcsik's point is well taken that there are non-substantial individuals – places.