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.
Substance and Subject
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来自 University of Pennsylvania 的课程
Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and His Successors
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从本节课中
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.
与讲师见面
Susan Sauvé MeyerProfessor
Department of Philosophy
[MUSIC]
Aristotle's Categories is a work of ontology.
That is, it is about onta, beings, or what there is.
He is interested in classifying the kinds of beings there are.
And within that classification,
he wants to identify the beings that are the most fundamental, important, or real.
Let's look now at the four-fold classification of beings that he
generates in chapter two.
And then see how he uses that classification to identify
the most fundamental realities.
Aristotle generates this four-fold ontology by invoking the two
subject predicate relations that we've been examining.
Being said of a subject and being in a subject.
He thinks you can sort anything that is into one of four categories by
asking two questions about it.
Is it said of a subject?
Yes or no?
And is it in a subject?
Yes or no?
Harry Potter fans can think of this as the two questions asked by
the Sorting Hat at the Aristotelian Institute of Ontology.
We've just seen that the distinction between being set of a subject, and
not being set of any subject,
amounts to the distinction between universals and particulars.
Thus, human being is a universal, which is said of Socrates, a particular.
And labrador retriever, dog, and animal are universals
that are said of the particular labrador retriever, Fido.
Okay, so that's the east west distinction.
What about the north south distinction?
This concerns whether an entity is in a subject.
Recall Aristotle's definition of being in a subject or
as we've been calling it, inherence.
What belongs to something not as a part, and
cannot exist separately from what it is in.
We saw how this is the relation in which walking stands to Socrates.
Walking is an activity of Socrates.
It is the sort of thing that cannot exist without being the activity of something.
This is also the relation in which brown stands to Fido,
supposing Fido was one of those beautiful chocolate brown labrador retrievers.
So, walking and brown are inherent items, while Socrates and Fido are not.
Things like colors, shapes, locations, activities, and so on go below the line.
Since they exist, only by inhering in subjects like Socrates or Fido.
But Socrates and Fido don't inhere in anything more fundamental so
they go above the line.
In chapter four, Aristotle introduces the term substance
to refer to the subjects of inherent items.
Those above the line.
Socrates and Fido are substances.
Now what should we call the items that go below the line,
beyond the fact that they inhere in substances?
In chapter four, Aristotle just gives us a list, quality,
quantity, activity, and so on.
The list, however, provides us with a way of classifying the source of things that
inhere in substances such as Socrates and Fido.
That is, he's enumerating the sorts of things that can be said
of the particular items that inhere in Socrates or Fido.
For example, take brown, which is in Fido, what is it?
Brown is a color.
So color instead of brown, that means color goes in
the right hand column because it's a universal.
But below the line because it inheres in a subject.
Now just as in the case of the universals above the line where we can ask what
is a dog, and get the answer it is an animal, we can ask further of color.
Below the line, what is it, and
eventually we are going to get the answer color is a quality.
So quality goes in this quadrant as well.
Note, that quality is one of the ten categories of being that
are listed in chapter four, where Aristotle says that every
entity invoked in a predication is either a substance, or
quantity, or quality, or relative, or where, or when, or
being-in-a-position, or having, or acting, or undergoing.
Indeed, all of those categories other than substance that is quality, quantity,
position, relation, activity, and so forth.
All of these will end up in the lower-right quadrant of
our four-fold classification.
Aristotle is proposing these as the highest
universals in the category of inherent entities.
Note that acting, which is on the list of these universals in chapter four,
will be said of walking, since walking is an action, something you do.
Okay, to sum up Aristotle's four-fold classification of beings.
It arises from the combination of two distinctions between universals and
particulars on the one hand, that's the east west distinction.
And between substances and inherent items on the other,
that's the north south distinction.
This yields four basic kinds of beings.
Universal substances, universal inherent properties,
particular inherent properties, and particular substances.
Now there is some dispute about how to understand the east west distinction south
of the line.
That is, between universals and particulars in the case of adherent
entities, but that complication need not concern us here.
What's important for
our purposes is the direction of the having a subject relation.
Recall that to have a subject is to be dependent on a more
fundamental underlying entity.
If we draw arrows pointing to the subject on which an entity depends,
we'll be able to see pretty clearly which category Aristotle
singles out as most important and why.
First, we can note the east west dependence.
Universals have particulars as their subjects.
So the arrows of dependence go towards the particulars.
Now, the north south dependence.
Inherent items have as their subjects, the substances in which they inhere.
Now, to identify the most fundamental beings.
Which category serves as the subject to every other?
Either directly or indirectly.
It is the category of particular substances.
All other entities are either said of them as subjects,
those are the universal substances.
Or, in them as subjects, those are the particular inherent items.
Or, have as their subjects items that do one of these two things.
Those are the universal inherent items, and note,
there are no arrows of dependence leading away from particular substances.
These have no subjects, but they are the subjects for everything else.
That makes them the most fundamental kind of being.
They underly everything, with nothing more fundamental that underlies them.
That is why Aristotle calls them primary substances.
He concludes in chapter five.
What is called substance most fully, primarily, and most of all,
is what is neither said of any subject nor in any subject.
For instance, an individual man or horse.
And all other things are either said of the primary
substances as subjects or in them as subjects.
As subjects for all other things,
primary substances are the most important or fundamental kind of being.
In fact, that's pretty much what the word translated substance means.
In Greek, it is ousia,
which is an abstract noun formed from the participle of the verb to be.
A more literal translation would be being-ness, and
a perfectly good rendering would be reality, where reality stands for
genuine or first class as opposed to derivative,
parasitic, or second grade being.
To call something an ousia is to confer a special,
high-grade ontological status on it.
Something that is lost in the translation substance since as we use the term,
we tend to think of substances as things you can spread, handle,
spray out of a can, or get stuck in your hair.
It's not an honorific term in the way Aristotle uses ousia.
Matters are even more complicated by the history of our English word substance,
which originates from the Latin translation of Aristotle's word for
subject, hupokeimenon, or underlying thing.
But don't worry about these linguistic complications if you find them
distracting.
I actually love this sort of thing.
The main point to keep in mind is that the term substance in
our translation of Aristotle is standing in for ousia,
which we can think of as the gold medal winner in the ontological olympics.
With this understanding of ousia, we can see that it has the ontological
status that Plato attributed to his intelligible forms.
So now we can articulate the ontological dispute between Plato and Aristotle.
Plato thought that the entities that deserve the title Ousia,
the most fundamental entities, are suprasensible, intelligible forms.
Aristotle, by contrast, thought that the most basic realities
are those that serve as subjects for all the rest.
And these are such ordinary entities as human beings, and other animals.
