Ep. 279: Aristotle’s “Categories” of Being (Part One)

0:09 Mark: Life, a podcast by Some guys are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 279 is something like, what are the kinds of entities that exist? We read Aristotle's categories from around 350 BC. More information and links to the text please visit PartiallyExinedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, uniquely inhabiting the species. Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:32 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, said to be in Cambridge, but not said to be in myself in Cambridge.

0:42 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, present in Madison, Wisconsin, but not said of Madison, Wisconsin.

0:48 Wes: Oh, had you planned that as well? Was that convergent?

0:50 Dylan: That was convergent metaphysics or something?

0:54 Mark: Yeah, because one of the categories is place. So, like, how are we not going to play off that, given that we're giving a location?

1:01 Wes: Well, it's not only that there's a category of place, but that there's also this use of this phrase being in.

1:07 Dylan: Yeah, present in, said, of, spoken of.

1:11 Wes: It's a very interesting way of putting it.

1:13 Mark: So this is a little appetizer that's categories to doing Aristotle's Metaphysics proper. That Aristotle's Metaphysics is a fat and imposing book. And the categories is small. It's like 40 pages. And then you read the commentaries on it, and they say, you know, some of those pages don't even matter. You can just kind of ignore the later chapters. Of course, I read the whole thing. So this is a nice. And it is perhaps written earlier. It is the first part of the organon, which, in other words, if you're reading Aristotle sort of for his logical works, it's right at the beginning. Dylan, are you trying to say something

1:47 Dylan: visually in the organon, in the order it's the first one. Yes, the Loeb book. I. No, our listeners cannot see that. I held up my copy of the Loeb version and Aristotle's. I don't know, there's 16 books or 20 books in it of these little Loeb editions. And it's the first thing in the

2:06 Mark: first one I heard on some podcast, somebody say, well, this is probably the one that's meant to be read first because it doesn't refer to the other texts, and all the other texts will refer to the earlier ones. It's like his whole corpus is spread out like a lesson plan, and this is what you do on the first day. But maybe he changed his mind later by the metaphysics, or if this was even later.

2:29 Wes: Well, he clearly did change his mind in the metaphysics completely.

2:33 Dylan: Yeah, there's some important things that he added.

2:34 Mark: So what is the purpose of this text right now? Sum up what we're doing here.

2:39 Wes: I thought a little bit about Hegel reading this because a lot of this concerns substance, right? Or by the time we get to Hegel, he's calling it the unconditioned. So we're thinking about what is. I don't know if this is a good word, but existentially basic and what is existentially derivative. And of course, you know, here in the categories, right, the word is going to be substance. And Aristotle has several criteria for what that would mean.

3:11 Dylan: At the top of the most interesting things that are in here is the discussion of substance. But if I were to say sort of what it's about, the very first section, he's talking about how we name things. And he's starting from what it means to talk about what something is in the terms of what we can say of it or predicate of it or not. And he ends up at this point about, there are special classes of things that end up being primary substances that end up being super interesting because of thinking through this context of naming and talking about the things in the world. So if I were to say what it's about, it's about, how do I talk about the things in the world?

3:52 Wes: We're thinking about fundamental categories of being. And there is this, you know, famous point of contention about in the beginning, it seems like he's talking mainly about language, or at least he's taking that as his point of departure. And there is a philosophical debate about when he's talking about these categories, is he talking about fundamental kinds of being? And if so, is taking language as a point of departure for that deceptive. Should his metaphysics really be based on the way language is structured? So, you know, he'll use this word subject a lot, and he's thinking about predication. And in a way, he's really. This is sort of begins as a reflection on the word is, as Clinton puts it. You know, it depends on what the meaning of the word is is, what it is is. And that's what he's trying to do. What are the different. We use the word is and what does that imply about reality?

4:47 Mark: We're about to introduce this text. So perhaps having listened to this podcast, then I could say, okay, go ahead and read the text. If somebody just asked me, should I read the categories? No, read a secondary source first. So I started this, and it's just like, what am I even reading? This is like Stereo instructions. This is like, you know, a menu, some technical manual. But once I just read the Stanford Encyclopedia article, like, okay, now I understand what he might be doing. The points of contention that you just mentioned. So is it that it's extra linguistic being.

That would be like we're doing, we're doing straight up metaphysics. Is it the parts of speech? Except he has a different text that's on the parts of speech. But it's certainly, as you say, he's taking language as a departure. Well, does that mean he's committed to this idea that for every part of speech that there is a type of being that corresponds to it? Is it, you know, that one to one, so that he doesn't actually have to distinguish, he doesn't even have to say, I'm not talking about language, I'm talking about the things that the words are referring to.

Because he just assumes that there's going to be a one to one correspondence and that there's not going to be anything really interesting about the world that's not captured by language and vice versa. So once I got that intro and the structure, which it's 15 chapters, the whole thing is pretty short. They divided into these pre predicamenta and then the predicamenta and then the post predicamenta. So the predicamenta, the middle stuff is that he actually gives the categories. Here are the 10 he's going to discuss like four of them in really in detail.

The rest he's going to say almost nothing about. And then the stuff before and after. That seems like maybe this is from a different text. Maybe is something to argue about, like why is it included here at all?

6:31 Wes: Yeah, for secondary sources, I think, for listeners think start with the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy article. Also very good is John Vella's Aristotle A Guide for the Perplexed, which is written in a very plain style. It almost seems kind of influenced by Aristotle, but it's very straightforward and it puts everything in very good context. And then also Jonathan Lear's Aristotle the desire to understand. And one of the advantages of looking at these secondary readings as well is just getting the big picture, especially the relationship to the metaphysics later on where Aristotle is going to be thinking about substance in terms of the relationship between form and matter, which is something entirely absent from this and so confusing if some, you know, if you've read metaphysics or if you've had at least secondhand accounts of Aristotle that talk about form and matter and you get to the categories and he's talking about Substance and not thinking about that.

It's odd in a way. It's like you get the feeling that there's almost. There's something missing. So yeah, it help helps to have lots of context coming into this text and it makes it a lot more interesting.

7:43 Dylan: It's worth noting that the word categories is the same word is used for predicate. And I read through the Stanford Encyclopedia and it's clear that there's all kinds of different controversies and we just articulated some of the ones that sound like the most important. I'm in no way like versed in all of them, but there's something on the surface, at the very least that you'd have to account for in the categories if you're going to try to dismiss it being taking a starting point from predication and understanding what is, is right in some way.

It's talking about, well, if I'm going to have a subject, what does it mean to talk about the subject of something? And what can I say of that subject? One of the things I like about Vella's book in this section is he formulates it in pretty much that sort of natural way that you would get when you read the categories, even without prejudicing you against other interpretations. And opening it up to the fact that thinking about how the way in which we talk about the world opens up, thinking about what the world is like. To me, that's a very Aristotelian way of doing things.

If you read Aristotle's other stuff, it's the way he starts with all kinds of things. What do I see going on and what do I learn more about when I look at it more closely.

9:02 Mark: Yeah, so let me just read the list so people have an idea of where we're going to be going here. So it's substance, obviously we've been talking about that quantity, quality or qualification relative. So relations where when being in a position, having a state or condition, doing or action and being affected or affection. So almost all these like substance is the basic one and everything else is. Well, you could either say it's something that has to somehow relate to a substance. Right. Something that a substance has. It's something that. But really, if you want to say that we're not talking about.

I think again, this is kind of a point of contention is that are we talking about aspects of substances or are we talking about fundamentally different types of being? Because like, for instance, place, the where is not going to be like Einsteinian and also the when time are not going to be like what we would think when we're talking about modern metaphysics, like is there just a grid of time and space that exists pre existent of anything? Like, no, for Aristotle, that is not a thing. So it's not like the way that this gets translated. I had really only heard about like Kant saying that this list is wrong.

Here's a better list. And I'm specifically Kant describing the categories that our understanding applies to make sense of experience. So he's specifically talking about a phenomenal realm and only secondarily talking about something metaphysical. Like the whole point of the Critique of Pure Reason is we can't really do metaphysics, but we can do this. So whether you think that space and time are pre existent in the world or something that our perceptions add, both of those things are pretty foreign to Aristotle. They're really about. I was listening to a podcast where that was talking about the place being specifically.

Like it is not a piece of space. It's kind of a relational property between you and the world that surrounds you. It is the same size as your body, the thing that your body is touching. That is a whole description of the place. Which is weird.

11:09 Wes: Yeah.

11:10 Dylan: Once you get past the relations, the where's, the whens, the attitude and so forth, that those are at some level attributes or kinds of relations themselves for substance. And at some level everything after substance are characteristics of substance.

11:31 Wes: He very straightforwardly says there is something which is ontologically basic. There's only one sort of thing that's completely independent. Right. That's what we mean by ontologically basic in part is that its being can self sufficiently exist. So whereas yellow, contra Plato, does not have its own existence except insofar as it is instantiated in a particular. There are things that do exist self sufficiently, and they're exactly what common sense tells us they are, which is just the particular things around us. Then the question is what we mean by thing.

And the sorts of things that Aristotle concentrates on are living things, because they are for good reason. They're obviously can be referred to as entities. They're tightly organized, they persist over time even as their properties are changing and so on. That's where we begin with substance. And then he's also going to talk about something called secondary substance, which is the species and genuses to which things belong. But we'll get to that. But yeah, I think, Dylan, I was just kind of seconding your point. We have 10 categories. One of them is substance, and the rest are these kind of dependent or derivative forms of being that are predicated of Substances and substance is the one thing that is not predicated of anything else but serves as the kind of substrate for them.

13:02 Dylan: This is where the beginning of the present in and set of distinctions. We probably should just go into that because I think it becomes more clear.

13:11 Mark: So that is the most useful thing that's in the pre. Predicamenta. Right. Before we actually get to the categories. Is this what's presented in the Stanford article as like actually a completely different, like fourfold way of breaking things up that sort of maps onto the categories?

13:27 Wes: Yeah, let's just go through that. There are two categories. Well, there.

13:33 Mark: Designations. Two designations.

13:34 Wes: Two designations each divided into two. And then you multiply them and you get four. So there's two axes, right? Okay. So there's the axis of said of versus not said of. And there's the axis of present in versus not present in. And then you combine those things to get four different types. And if we go by the Stanford Encyclopedia article, and this is not the only way I've seen this done, so for the author of the Stanford article, maybe we should just say who that

14:02 Dylan: is because Paul Studtmann.

14:04 Wes: Okay, so for Studtmann, it's said of is just straightforwardly what Aristotle means by universal, not said of is what he means by particular is what he uses to mean particular. Present in is accidental, not present in is essential. We can discuss whether we would agree with that and look at the text more closely here. But what that yields is four types of things. Accidental universals like whiteness or knowledge. Essential universals like what Aristotle calls secondary substances. Natural kinds you predicate not whiteness of something, but that it's a horse, that it's a human being.

Accidental particulars which Studtmann interprets as tropes, which we can talk about what that means, but basically a particular whiteness in a thing as opposed to the universal and then non accidental particulars or primary substances. These are the not set of and not present in. This is our substance. So horses, human beings, natural kinds. I read one commentary which calls it a biological ontology, which I think is a good way of putting it.

15:15 Dylan: Vella says that you've given a good

15:17 Mark: idea of the character of how. I bet everybody's brain just turned off when you were reading that list, Wes. So I think we have to spend a little more time. What is the set of relation versus the present in relation.

15:28 Dylan: Why don't I just.

15:29 Wes: That's read. Yeah.

15:30 Dylan: Aristotle on present in.

15:32 Mark: Yep.

15:33 Dylan: So this whole division that we're talking about is in section two of categories, page four.

15:40 Mark: In our version.

15:41 Dylan: Yep. Yep.

15:41 Wes: Are we all using the same?

15:43 Dylan: I used my copy of in the Loeb Library, which is translated by Cooke and Tredennick.

15:50 Mark: Okay, well, we're reading the Ackrill.

15:52 Dylan: Okay, that's fine. The second paragraph gives you the set of and the present in parts. So. But as for the things that are meant when we thus speak of uncombined words, you can predicate some of a subject, but they never are present in one. So you can predicate man, for example, of this or that man as the subject, but man is not found in the subject. That's the said of. And then by present in, I do not mean present, or is found as its parts are contained in a whole. I mean that they cannot exist as apart from that subject.

16:25 Mark: With the example being the individual white is in a subject. Yeah, the body for all colors in a body, but is not said of any subject. This is sort of relates to English grammar, but not all that well, because it seems like we say of any property. Let's contrast that with properties that we really want to say are in the thing. It sounds like this is the intrinsic extrinsic distinction, but I don't think that's actually going to be the case because I guess there's the question of how this maps on the category. So you could say a whiteness is in the thing, at least on certain metaphysical pictures, but a whiteness we're saying of.

Since the example here is like, what genus is it in? So something is if you have a white plate. Well, it's not like there's plateness in the object. No, it's just in the category plate. But the white is in the object. It's not in the category white thing. That's not its natural kind.

17:21 Dylan: Biological examples are easy to do. So there's a tree in my front yard, right? And one thing that I would say of it is that it's an oak tree, okay? So that kind of species speak is a said of statement of a particular instance of a thing. That's just an example of said of. And when you say not said of is if you have an entity that is not said of something, is a particular instance of any kind of entity. So Mark Linsenmayer is not said of anything. There's nothing in the world that you would say is besides Mark. Did you say is Mark Linsenmayer?

18:01 Wes: So not predicated.

18:02 Dylan: Not predicated. You can't predicate Mark Linsenmayer of anything.

18:05 Mark: I mean, technically you can, because, like, who's that guy? Well, that guy's Mark Linsenmayer. I just predicated of that guy. But you're saying that. No, no, that guy already picked me out. So you're just saying I'm equivalent to myself.

18:16 Dylan: It seems like a peculiar case. That's like a degenerate case of predication there. That's a kind of pointing rather than predicating.

18:24 Mark: Well, or then who is the host of the Nakedly Examined Music podcast? You might not know. And so I'm going to say of that individual that it's me. Okay. But still, I think it's like the original phrase through a unique description, as opposed to the host of the Partially Examined Life podcast, which is all of us. There's no unique reference to that. Once you've referred to the thing, then you've already picked it out. And so you're not saying of it even if you identify it.

18:52 Wes: We're talking about the way in which we pick out a particular, which we could use a secondary substance or a natural kind. Right. To pick out a particular. But that's not the same thing as the particular. So however I get at that individual particular Mark, the particular itself is not predicated of anything. Right. I can imagine that Mark is a predicate or that man is a predicate, but the particular entity itself is never a predicate. So what is not said of. I think Dylan just put it very well. It's just things. Right? Just what we normally refer to as things.

19:27 Dylan: Particular existent things.

19:28 Mark: Right. Well, and Wes, you were pointing out before this, even though he gives white as the example of something that's in it, but not of it, he specifically says the individual White. We were calling that a trope, which I think there's like whole theories of tropes that we don't know anything about. So maybe we should even ignore that. But we talked about sensory particulars in our Hegel one. So like that we had a hard time saying what that was, and so now we've done that work. So let's say sensory particular. So that is something that is in it, but it's not of it. But maybe the universal white. But isn't the universal white.

20:01 Wes: The lingo is so infuriating. But individual white is not said of, but it's in. And the universal white. Yeah. Is said of and present in.

20:12 Mark: Whereas the example he gives in here, some are both said of a subject and in a subject. For example, knowledge is in a subject. The soul is also said of a subject, eg, knowledge of grammar. So it's not said of the same Subject.

20:27 Wes: Yeah. So that's like the individual white. This is another trope example. There's the individual white trope, and then there's the individual grammatical knowledge trope, which is to say you and I both know some ancient Greek. We have different levels of knowledge of ancient Greek. This is not just an abstraction. Universal knowledge of Greek. This is my particular knowledge of Greek or your particular knowledge of Greek. Two very different things. Tropes that are properties of our souls.

20:59 Mark: That's not in the trope section. The trope section is the not set of yet present in the one that the knowledge is is of the set of and not present in. Is that right? I'm at least looking at the Stanford here.

21:15 Wes: So it says for the example, the individual knowledge of grammar is in a subject.

21:20 Mark: Oh, yeah, sorry. It's a set of and present in

21:23 Wes: the soul, but is not said of any subject. So in not said, that's a trope

21:29 Dylan: said of and present in.

21:31 Wes: He does talk about grammar later on. There is a universal knowledge of grammar as well. Right. For every trope, there's also the universal.

21:37 Mark: So, okay, what's confusing is just that the Stanford is giving them in a different order than in the actual text, which seems like a needless complication.

21:44 Dylan: Just.

21:45 Wes: Yeah, that's true. That does do that.

21:47 Dylan: It leads off with the last one.

21:49 Mark: Right? So the last one. Some are neither in a subject nor said of a subject. For example, the individual man or the individual horse, for nothing of this sort is either in a subject or said of a subject. Things that are individual and numerically 1 are without exception, not said of any subject. But there's nothing to prevent some of them from being in a subject. The individual knowledge of grammar is one of these things in a subject. So a trope can be in a subject, sensory, particular. So what is the point of us slaving over that? Like it seems when we get to the categories, it's gonna apparently just ignore that altogether, or at least it takes us some work to then map them exactly onto the categories.

22:28 Dylan: So he doesn't do that work. This is common in Aristotle, right? Because we skipped over the first section. But he's starting with another kind of division. He starts with things that are equivocally named and univocally named. Right, and derivatively named. So he starts with this notion of kinds of naming, and then he moves into, okay, now I'm going to focus on things that are uniquely named, and I'm going to start working with those. But he doesn't make those links to Say, okay, now I've made this classification. I'm going to talk about how each of the different categories maps onto this fourfold division. That's what happens in these other analyses.

23:10 Wes: Right.

23:10 Mark: I felt like chapter one was just giving us a couple terms that maybe he's going to use later. So, like, there are homonyms, there are synonyms. And I didn't know this. There are paronyms, things, you know, having the same root, grammarian versus grammar, brave versus bravery. And so paronyms. That comes up later in the text. But that was the only use I could find out of that. But you were still initially interpreting that as like, this whole thing shows that he's using language to get into here.

23:37 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, just an example, and I should pull up the Ackrill. But the second paragraph of 1. Things are univocally named when not only they bear the same name, but the same name means the same in each case has the same definition corresponding. Thus, a man and an ox are called animals. The name is the same in both cases. So also the statement of essence. For if you are asked what is meant by their both of them being called animals, you give that particular name in both cases of the same definition.

24:06 Mark: That's even a weird way of talking about synonyms because, like, the fact that a man and ox are both animals. That doesn't mean man and ox are synonymous in any way. Like.

24:16 Wes: Yeah, it's just a different technical use of the term. Yeah. So it's not what we.

24:20 Mark: A technical use that he's not going to use any further that I found in the text.

24:24 Wes: I don't know how to explain the relation of chapter one to the rest of it. I did see something in a commentary that tried to make the connection to me.

24:31 Dylan: What immediately jumped out about that one is when you say both a man and ox are animals, you are predicating something of them. So you are putting them into a category, to use an overloaded term. Right. And so it's part of the process of dividing the world of things into sorts of things. And so animals is a thing that I would say of entities like man and ox. It's something that they have in common. That's what that paragraph means to me.

25:03 Mark: The thing lurking in the background of this whole text is his whole style of doing definitions. And if this is supposed to be your absolute introduction to Aristotle's logic, it seems like he should have laid this out right at the beginning. But it's sort of just assumed that, like, the way that we define something is by its genus and its species within that genus. And then you know what the thing

25:24 Dylan: is, you have to remember that Aristotle's works that we have are, I think, universally understood to basically be different kinds of lecture notes. And they've been assembled over time. And they're not, in general, complete works that are crafted versus the way Plato's dialogues are. They're not of that level of refinement.

25:48 Wes: Yeah. Since the word definition came up here, it is useful just to say that when he's talking about definition, right. He's not just talking about dictionary definitions and semantics. To define something for Aristotle is to say what the essence of it is. It is to say what it is to be that thing. That's the way he puts essence in the. In the Greek, the. What it is to be. So in the case of human being, it's to be a rational animal. So the way you say what it is to be something is you. You take a higher genus, you take a higher kind, and then you give differentiae. Differentiae. Differentiae. How would I say that?

26:27 Dylan: Differentiating terms.

26:28 Wes: Yes, you give differentiating, differentiation. Differentia. There you go. All right. So you give differentia. And those separate off human being from other animals and they add this level of specificity and they say something right. About our essence. Being rational is actually, it's important to what it is to be human being. And without it, we would be, you know, if we were no longer rational. If we lose that quality, then arguably we're no longer human. That's the only thing that separates us off from mere animality, let's say.

27:04 Mark: Right. I'm glad you specified that it's differentia rather than just species, because.

27:08 Wes: Right. The species is human.

27:10 Mark: You have a whole chain of differentia potentially. And that is arguably what we're doing in this thing is you're asking, I want to focus on this particular little portion of reality. And I define that by giving more and more general terms and like, what is the highest level term that I can come up with so that if I'm picking out whiteness, like, well, what is that? Well, it's a color. But then what is a color? A color is a property, it's a quality, and that ends up being the highest level term. And there was some discussion about, like, well, what isn't the highest level term? Just being. But apparently in the metaphysics, Aristotle says that that doesn't actually count as a genus because for something to be a genus, it has to be contrasted to something else.

27:52 Wes: Right.

27:52 Mark: So animal has to be animal, vegetable, mineral, I'm sure those are the Aristotelian geniuses.

27:58 Wes: Yeah, that's why we are stuck with 10 categories, as opposed to one highest level category being. Right. And the idea is that these different categories aren't just species of something. Again, you know, Marcus, you put it where you could just give the genius genus being and then add some differentia and then produce your species. They are all related. He calls this pros hen, types of being. So they're related to the concept of being. So in the same way, for instance, that when we talk about something being healthy, it could be something that produces health, like healthy food.

It could be just, I'm healthy, I have health. So when I do that, I'm not talking about species of health. That makes no sense. I'm talking about relations to health, productive of having, of, and other sorts of relations. And that's the relation that these categories all have to being. So not a species genus relation, but a different kind of relation.

28:58 Mark: You're cashing in the. They're all paronymously related, that they're all related to health. They have health as their common root. So there you go. We just used the thing he introduced in chapter one. It had a use right there.

29:09 Wes: Okay, great. We should say, though, you mentioned yellow in the same breath that we were mentioning natural kinds. So these are in this fourfold distinction in the beginning. These fall into different categories. So the yellow is a universal. But to say horse, to predicate a horse of an individual is not like predicating yellow of it. A horse is a natural kind. You could call it an essential universal. But as we'll see in chapter 5, you also refer to this as secondary substance. So he's a little bit conflicted here. We'll see about whether we should say substances are just things, they're just particular things in the world, or whether we should think of these natural kinds as substances.

And this is something that'll, you know, in the metaphysics, of course, this is kind of the pivot point where he'll change his mind in the metaphysics, so that it's not particulars that are primary substances. Anyway, maybe I went on too long there, but.

30:05 Mark: Yeah, yeah, well, let's do some substance. So this is chapter four, chapter three. So each of these chapters is like a page, half a page. Some are just one paragraph, some are a couple pages. They're all pretty short. Chapter three and four, both about predication and sort of.

30:20 Dylan: And four is where he says the categories.

30:22 Mark: Yes, and four is where he said the categories. Five, a substance that which is called a substance. Most strictly, primarily and most of all is that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, eg, the individual man or the individual horse. The species in which the things primarily called substances are, are called secondary substances, as also are the genera of these species. For instance, the individual man belongs in the species man. An animal is genus of the species. So those, both man and animal are called secondary substances.

30:54 Dylan: Here you go.

30:56 Wes: Why does substance turn out to be biological entities here? You know, it's a really interesting path that he's taking, and it's not entirely clear why.

31:05 Mark: So wasn't there something in the Greek word for substance that I thought it was like literally the what it is, but you were saying essence is the what it is.

31:12 Wes: This is ousia. So what is it basically just means being. It's just a particle, right. It's a way of translating being. So the being of a thing primarily is. Right, is just to be, as we said in the beginning, a particular thing. But here it's no longer particular thing. Apparently it's particular biological entities. And the background context to this is that for Plato, what was most real were abstract, otherworldly forms.

31:45 Dylan: Forms.

31:46 Wes: And for the Presocratics, we had something that was much closer to a. The kind of explanation we would get in contemporary science. Whether it was atoms or whether it was elements, they seem to be focused on reducing the what it is of things to matter, let's say. And here he's caught in a. In a middle realm, right? In one commentary, it's Vella again. I think it's. He's basically coming out on the side of, well, common sense, right? It's not these invisible entities that common sense, everyday macroscopic objects are reducible to. We're not going to talk about whether it's abstract otherworldly forms or, you know, microscopic, invisible atoms, you know, the most basic things in the world, they're just the biological entities that we see around us.

And it's a question to me, I don't know if there are other sorts of entities. Maybe. Is it just biological entities? I'm a little unclear on that. But what about a desk? What about a rock?

32:48 Dylan: Yeah, but a desk and a rock are going to be two different ones, right? Because a desk is an artifact, but the moon isn't an artifact. A river isn't an artifact. I think Wes's contrast with Plato's forms and the Presocratics with atoms and kind of materialist is good. One thing that's worth noting, both of those have a Kind of universality about them, eternality about them. They're different kinds of reaching for eternality. But in the case of the atoms, those are things that exist always and are uncuttable, for instance. And the. And the forms are things that exist eternally from which everything gets their character in that way. Aristotle isn't a middle ground, but he's opposed to both of them in the particulars being the things that exist.

33:41 Wes: Yeah, there needs to be. You refer to it as eternality, or we might call it persistence. So for something to count as an entity for us, sure, and this is why we're talking about substance. Something needs to persist, right. It has to have an identity over time as it changes and. Right. This will become one of Aristotle's criteria later on in the categories for being a substance is that it admits contraries unlike every other category of being. Right. It can maintain its identity even as it changes. And part of why that's important, that persistence is important, is because to know anything, to say that we know anything, it has to have some kind of persistence.

It has to be a being, it has to be an entity that if it's all just flux, it's impossible to say that we would know such a thing. And that's why Plato was so driven to conclude that if we're to know anything, it must be these otherworldly, unchanging forms. And likewise with the pre Socratics, ultimately we want these basic constituents of reality that explain everything else. And in both schemes, we're thinking about what's most basic, what's persistent and what explains everything else. Right. And in the Presocratics we get a kind of causal explanation that we're familiar with.

And I think that we would lean towards. Right. So we don't look at a cat and think, hey, that's ontologically basic. No, we think it's a swirling mass of molecules and atoms. That's how influenced we are by a scientific worldview. In a way, we think it's non essential. Right. We think it's an accidental product of forces and particles and evolution. So this whole strain of treating biological entities as the basic persistent starting points for explanation, that's pretty radical, I think.

35:38 Mark: Well, and we've already pointed toward the reason once we actually read the following two paragraphs of what makes Aristotle unique, considering what he sees to be the relatively stable, stable enough to be ontologically basic objects, is that even though you said, Wes, that they can have contrary properties, only certain kinds of properties can be contrary.

35:59 Wes: Right.

35:59 Mark: It can be over here it can be over there, it can be wet, it can be dry, but its definitional properties have to stay the same. And that is the thing that right is unique to Aristotle because once you move to, you know, all the properties can change. You get like Descartes, the wax. What is the wax? Well, if I melt it, then, you know, it has a different form. The melted wax might not resemble the pre melted wax at all. We might just not even know that it's the same thing. But yet it's still the same substance. There's still a substance that underlies the properties. And you can see right there, which

36:32 Wes: for Descartes is just extension. And there's only two substances, soul and extension. So that's another really interesting view of what substance might be. Is spatial extension not even matter.

36:43 Dylan: Yeah, stuff.

36:44 Mark: And you could see then. But if you just boil it down to like, it's just whatever it is apart from any properties whatsoever, then that's where Locke jumps in and says, we have no idea of substance. Like that's not something. And Berkeley even to getting to the idea of like material substances is just something that is a self contradictory concept.

37:03 Wes: Locke does say though, if we are going to think of anything as having an essence or a substance, we want to think about it in terms of microstructure. So he understands that the modern scientific worldview is a competing concept of substance. I just bring it up because I think it helps explain what Aristotle is doing and how it's different from our intuitions. But to talk of atoms and microstructure and the physics of today is to talk about a competing materialistic account of what it is to be a substance.

37:32 Mark: So let's finally read that second paragraph. It is clear from what has been said that if something is said of a subject, both its name and its definition are necessarily predicated of that subject. For example, man. Instead of a subject, the individual man and the name is of course predicated, since you'll be predicating man of the individual man. And also the definition of man will be predicated of the individual man, since the individual man is also man. Thus both the name and the definition will be predicated of the subject. But as for things which are in a subject, in most cases neither the name nor the definition is predicated of the subject.

Let's just focus on that first half. So the primary substances which are not predicated of other things, but other things are predicated of it. Right. It is the subject. It is the primary subject. You could talk about the whiteness as being A subject. There's lots of things you could sort of put in that subject position. But the primary thing is going to be the primary substance. And whenever you're saying anything of it, you're going to be saying its definition.

38:30 Wes: Right. The contrast here is between saying that something belongs to a natural kind, attributing a kind of essence to it, and then just saying it has some sort of accidental property. So if I say something is white, I do not thereby predicate the definition of white of that object. Right. So if I say I'm Wes is white, I do not say that Wes is the reflection of a light of a certain wavelength, something like that. But if I say west is a human being, I do predicate the definition. I am saying Wes is a rational animal, something more like an identity statement. Right. With the predication of a natural kind or a secondary substance, the essential universal, we're saying what the thing is. We're giving an account of its identity. It's not just like predicating a property of the thing.

39:27 Mark: And I wonder what he had in mind for what a definition of white was. Because that's his example, for example, white, which is in a subject, the body is predicated of the subject. For a body is called white. But the definition of white will never be predicated of the body. But he's not going to explain white as the wavelengths of. So, like, what does he think the definition is? It is the color that is the lightest one or something, you know?

39:48 Wes: Yeah, yeah, that's good. Yeah, it's one of the colors. Let's say color number one, the not

39:55 Mark: after Labor Day color. I think that's the official definition.

39:59 Dylan: Yeah.

39:59 Wes: So it's a really interesting, you know, to say is white is not to say what it is to be white, but to say is human is to say is what it is to be human. Something like that. I mean, here's another way to think of it. When we say someone is a human being, we're talking about the whole in a way. And we're talking about the whole in terms of its activity, its processes, its functioning. We're talking about deep structure, Right. Or what later on in the metaphysics, he'll call form. Something that's happening in the. The material thing, but it's not like in it in the sense that yellow is sort of glommed on to a particular entity. We're sort of giving the blueprint of the entity. It kind of suffuses. It's structurally inhabits the whole thing. I don't know. Does Those metaphors help.

40:50 Dylan: It's what it is. So saying that a chicken is a bird is saying something about what it is. Saying that the chicken is yellow isn't saying something about what it is.

41:01 Wes: Yeah, it's like giving the DNA of something or the fundamental informational template or pattern of that thing which runs through it. I'm trying to get at why it's of the whole as opposed to of a part. But, you know, if I predicate the blueprint of something, it's much different than predicating a property, maybe, let's put it that way.

41:21 Dylan: So things that aren't incidental to it. I mean, the thing about the blueprint case, right. Is that for a house, the blueprint is not essential to the house. The blueprint might be a way to picture the essentiality or something like that.

41:35 Wes: I'm speaking metaphorically as if the house were a biological entity in which the blueprint says what the house is.

41:42 Mark: Let's go to the third paragraph here. All the other things are either said of the primary substances as subjects or in them as subjects. This is clear for an examination of cases. For example, animal is predicated of man, and therefore also the individual man. For it were predicated of none of the individual men, it would not be predicated of man at all. Again, color is in body and therefore also in an individual body. For were it not in some individual body, would not be in body at all. That's kind of important part.

42:11 Wes: Well, read the most important sentence at the end first, and then we'll talk about it.

42:14 Mark: Thus, all the other things are either said of the primary substances as subjects or in them as subjects. For if the primary substances did not exist, it would be impossible for any of the other things to exist. Okay, so that was stating explicitly what I was merely pointing at implicitly from the previous sentences, which you might think, like, I can't remember what the context I've heard of this of, like, the missing point in the color spectrum. Like, what if it just happened to be the case that there are things in the world that are all the colors, but there's one little gap, and it just happens. It's a really, really narrow gap. And you might think that, well, just the way that the color spectrum works, all those colors exist. Quote. But according to Aristotle, it seems like if there is no individual thing in the world that has that missing color, that individual color does not exist.

43:01 Dylan: Yeah, I think that he would say that color is not an existent. An existent thing. It's not a substance. The only things that Exist are substances.

43:09 Wes: Yeah. There are no such things as woolly mammoths. Right. So the natural kind, woolly mammoth, doesn't exist either.

43:19 Mark: But what Dylan said, though, is wrong, because clearly he thinks the white, those adjectives are not substances, but yet they exist. They exist as tropes.

43:30 Dylan: Right.

43:30 Mark: So there is an individual white that exists in that individual thing. And I guess what I was going to say is they both exist as tropes and they're the universal white. But maybe that's the thing that just doesn't exist.

43:40 Wes: If the tropes aren't there, then you don't get the universal either. But go ahead, Dylan.

43:44 Dylan: So this all turns on. What does Aristotle mean by it exists? Something like yellow or a color doesn't exist without the entity existing the way in which a particular exists as distinct from a species. Right. So it seems like my dog Worf exists for Aristotle in a different way than dogs exist as dog, the genus dog, or the species of Shar Pei.

44:17 Mark: Sure, those are secondary substances. So I think that we could have secondary properties as well. And they don't, strictly speaking, exist when

44:25 Wes: we're talking about universals.

44:27 Dylan: Yes, that's all I meant is that strictly speaking is important.

44:30 Wes: Universals exist if they're instantiated for Aristotle. Right. So there's no. For Plato, there's yellowness. Whether anything in the world is yellow and yellowness is prior to everything. In a way, yellowness is responsible for anything being yellow. For Aristotle, there is no such thing as yellowness unless there are yellow tropes, unless there's yellow instantiations of yellow. Then you could legitimately say the universal exists, but it's derivative of its particular trope existences across particulars.

45:02 Mark: But you'd have to say, in. In what sense does it exist? Because it's not just like that. Human minds see a bunch of individual yellow things and they create a concept.

45:12 Dylan: Right.

45:12 Mark: So he's not a nominalist about concepts, he's a realist about concepts. It's just that they have a. I don't even think he says. I'm trying to remember if actually, when he's talking about secondary substances, does he say something like, strictly speaking that I just said, or is that a modern importation? I think he says specifically that they're less substantial. So secondary substances are less substantial than primary substances.

45:35 Wes: Right. There's a hierarchy. So the primary substance of the individuals, like an individual human being, secondary substance is the natural kind of human being. And then as you go up the levels of generality, like to animal, it becomes less Substantial, the more generic that you get.

45:53 Mark: It's actually in the next paragraph. Let me just read it. So now we're on page seven of our translation of the secondary substances. The species is more a substance than the genus, since it is near to the primary substance. For if one is to say of the primary substance what it is, it will be more informative and apt to give the species than the genus. For example, it'd be more informative to say of the individual man that he's a man than that he's an animal, since the one is more distinctive of the individual man, while the other is more general and more informative to say the individual.

This is obvious. Further, it is because the primary substances are subjects for all the other things, and all the other things are predicated of them or are in them that they are called substances most of all. But as the primary substances stand to the other things, so the species stands to the genus. The species is a subject for the genus, for the genera are all predicated of the species, but the species are not predicated reciprocally of the genera. Hence, for this reason, too, the species is more of a substance than the genus.

46:51 Wes: This reflects some of the dilemma in the endeavor here. The dilemma is between the things that seem most real in the world are the tangible, particular things around us. On the other hand, what's most knowable and intelligible, in a sense, are generic things, right? When we know things, we know them through their natural kinds, for instance. And he's trying to convince himself here. Well, there's a good reason for calling natural kind substances, because in a way, they're analogous to individual things. Because in a way, when I attribute a genus to them and then the differentia, I'm predicating something of them. So it's. That's, I think, what is going on here.

47:32 Dylan: And the more general you get, you effectively get to tertiary and quaternary substances. You know, you keep getting further and further away from the primary substance, and it becomes less and less real. There's more and more abstract.

47:45 Wes: Yeah.

47:45 Mark: Before Orwell settled on Animal Farm, he was thinking more generally it was just Substance Farm. And it was, you know, all substances are substances, but some are more substances than others.

47:57 Wes: That's great. What's going on here is very important because to talk about predication, right, being able to predicate particular properties of things, we have to be able to identify a thing. We have to be able to say that something is actually an entity. And there are enormous implications to that. Think about our consciousness episode. We're trying to identify identity conditions for a particular human consciousness over time and how paradoxical and difficult that is. So Aristotle is asking a very deep question here of what it could ever mean to say that something is an entity, except that it has to have this very tight structural organization that persists over time and over certain kinds of change.

Yeah, over certain types of change. So even though we are tempted to talk about the materiality of the world, which Aristotle's account in part captures, that we're tempted to go the route of the Presocratics, for instance, there's still something importantly formal required if something is to be an entity. And natural kinds capture that best. Right. So going back to our Kripke episode, the only thing that can be rigidly designated is a natural kind. That's the only thing that can be fixed in a way ostensibly that you can do counterfactuals with and so on and so forth.

49:20 Mark: Which is another way of saying that it does not admit of contraries in those respects.

49:25 Wes: Yeah.

49:26 Mark: That if you imagine that the water, that it changed its chemical structure, well, it wouldn't be water anymore. There's no underlying substance. Water that has hydrogen and oxygen. No, that's just what water is.

49:37 Dylan: That seems like a good pausing point.

49:39 Mark: Yeah. You know, I said these chapters are all short, but this chapter is the one that's not. That goes on for several days.

49:46 Wes: The meat. This is the.

49:47 Dylan: Yes. Yeah.

49:48 Wes: Best part.

49:49 Dylan: The juicy part.

49:52 Wes: He puts in a lot of fluff at the end. He pads it.

49:57 Dylan: It's thin, carb, loaded dessert. That just isn't very satisfying.

50:01 Wes: It's not substantial.

50:02 Mark: There's still some. Yeah. So I think we've said, you know, we've given an overview of the categories. We've said substance is by far the most important one. We'll have a little more to say about that and then we can talk about properties and relations and all the other stuff that's he doesn't talk at so much length about. If you want to hear that, you will have to listen to part two of the discussion supporters. You can get that. Either it's next thing in your feed right now or next week you'll see it in your feed.