What is philosophy? How does it differ from science, religion, and other modes of human discourse? This course traces the origins of philosophy in the Western tradition in the thinkers of Ancient Greece. We begin with the Presocratic natural philosophers who were active in Ionia in the 6th century BCE and are also credited with being the first scientists. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines made bold proposals about the ultimate constituents of reality, while Heraclitus insisted that there is an underlying order to the changing world. Parmenides of Elea formulated a powerful objection to all these proposals, while later Greek theorists (such as Anaxagoras and the atomist Democritus) attempted to answer that objection. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates insisted on the importance of the fundamental ethical question—“How shall I live?”—and his pupil, Plato, and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, developed elaborate philosophical systems to explain the nature of reality, knowledge, and human happiness. After the death of Aristotle, in the Hellenistic period, Epicureans and Stoics developed and transformed that earlier tradition. We will study the major doctrines of all these thinkers. Part I will cover Plato and his predecessors. Part II will cover Aristotle and his successors.
Universals and Particulars
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來自 University of Pennsylvania 的課程
Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and His Successors
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從本節課中
Aristotle’s Categories
Aristotle’s anti-Platonic metaphysics: the ultimate realities are ordinary objects of our experience, like people and animals. Each of these is a substances, the most fundamental type of being.
與講師見面
Susan Sauvé MeyerProfessor
Department of Philosophy
[MUSIC]
According to Aristotle,
some entities that are predicated of a subject are in that subject.
We can call this kind of dependence on a subject "inherence".
That's what the last lecture was about.
But not all predicated items inhere in their subjects.
Some of them, instead, are said of a subject but not in any subject.
Now what does this mean?
Here is an example of a said of predication.
Socrates is a human being.
This predication answers the question, what is Socrates?
Whereas Socrates' walking does not.
Socrates may in fact be walking, but walking is not what he is.
This is what Aristotle means when he explains in chapter five of the categories
that if you want to tell whether a predicated entity inheres in its subject
just substitute the definition of the predicated item for its name.
Walking is a movement of the legs.
But Socrates is not a movement of the legs.
So, walking is not said of Socrates.
Now try it with the predicate human being,
which Aristotle defines as rational animal.
We can take the predication, Socrates is a human being, and
replace human being with its definition, and
we get Socrates is a rational animal, which is true.
So, human being passes the test.
It is said of Socrates.
Now what is the significance of marking off this class of predications?
Recall the sorts of questions Socrates asks in Plato's dialogues.
All of those, what is x questions.
The sorts of predications that Aristotle classifies as said of predications
are ones that give a proper answer to these questions,
whereas inherent predications do not.
In fact, we can use Aristotle's vocabulary to restate the criticism that
Socrates made of Euthyphro's attempt to answer the question what is piety,
by proposing that piety is what all the gods love.
Aristotle might say to Euthyphro, yes, the pious is loved by all the gods,
but this is an inherent predication, not a said of predication.
Being-loved-by-the-gods is something that belongs to piety,
it is in piety, but it is not what piety is, so it is not said of piety.
The take away point here is that from Aristotle's perspective,
Socrates' quest for the answer to his what is x question
is a search for what is said of x.
Now, Aristotle claims you can divide all beings
into those that are said of a subject, and those that are not.
Those that can be invoked to identify what something is,
to answer our what is x question, are said of a subject.
They go on the right hand side of the line.
Thus, human and Labrador retriever go on the right hand side.
While Socrates and Fido go on the left.
Note that something might be both said of a subject like Labrador or
retriever is said of Fido.
And also have other things said of it.
Since dog and also animal are said of Labrador retriever.
What's a Labrador retriever?
It's a dog.
What's a dog?
It's a kind of animal.
That is, something like Labrador retriever can be both said of a subject and
also have other things said of it.
But all that matters for this classification is whether
Labrador retriever is said of anything, and the answer to this is yes.
Fido was a Labrador retriever, and so Labrador retriever instead of Fido.
Labrador retriever goes on the right hand side of this basic division of entities.
The basic distinction Aristotle is driving at here, is between what his general or
universal on the one hand, and what is particular on the other.
Things that are said of a subject are what Aristotle calls universals.
They belong to many particular things.
For example, human being belongs to Socrates, to Plato, to you.
Labrador retriever belongs to Fido, and to my neighbor's dog, and so on.
By contrast, particular human beings like Socrates and
particular Labrador retrievers like Fido are numerically one.
They don't have more specific instances that they belong to.
Fido is not a kind of Labrador retriever, but a Labrador retriever.
Socrates is not a kind of human being, but a human being.
This is what Aristotle means when he says that things not said of a subject
are individually and numerically one.
They are particulars.
Now even if there are increasing levels of generality among universals Labrador
retriever is a particular kind of dog, and dogs are a particular kind of animal.
Still, Labrador retriever, dog, and
animal are all universals rather than particulars.
They all have instances that fall under them.
But particulars such as Socrates and Fido do not.
So, the particulars go on the left hand side of this basic division,
since they are not said of any subject, and the universals go on the right,
since they do have subjects that they are said of.
In effect, universals like human, dog, and
Labrador retriever are Aristotle's version of platonic forms,
since they answer what is x questions.
The answer to a what is X question will be said of the many Xs
in the way that human being is said of Socrates, and dog is said of Fido.
The beautiful itself turns out to be an entity that is said of the many beautifuls.
The just itself will be said of the many just things.
The pious itself will be said of the many pious things.
Note how this Aristotelian picture inverts the relation of
priority between forms and sensibles that Plato insisted on.
While Plato took the answer to what is x questions to be intelligible forms
more real than the particular objects that depend on them for their being.
Aristotle has the dependence relation going in the other direction.
For the many beautiful things will be the subjects for the beautiful itself.
And then many just things will be the subjects for the just itself, and so on.
And the subjects are more fundamental,
more real than the items that are predicated out of them.
We'll see how Aristotle works out this picture in more detail when we look at
the four-fold classification of beings that Aristotle articulates in chapter
two of The Categories.
