Ep. 336: Aristotle on Being and Non-Contradiction (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. We are continuing on Aristotle's Metaphysics. This is episode 336, so you might want to listen to 335 first. In this segment, our questions will be how can we study what it is like for anything to just be? What justifies the principle of non contradiction and is truth relative? That's a lot packed in there. All in Metaphysics, Book 4, aka Gamma. This is Mark Linsenmayer, identical to Mark Linsenmayer, sitting down in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan. Not at the same time in the same respect. Not Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:49 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, confident that I am not a battleship in Madison, Wisconsin, or a trireme, depending upon your translation.

0:58 Mark: You're sometimes not Wes Alwan, but just at a particular time in a particular respect. So this was a barrel of fun, just like last time. We've now expanded this, if it's not clear, into four, four discussions.

1:15 Dylan: Seth.

1:15 Mark: He says he's having travel problems and that it's not that he just had some allergic reaction to this text.

1:22 Dylan: I didn't get the impression that. I got the impression that his dog was prevented from coming back into the United States. And so they're stuck in Mexico until Tuesday.

1:30 Mark: What are you doing bringing your dog to Mexico? Come now. The Routledge companion had three different chapters corresponding to those three questions that I put out there. But this is actually not that many pages in total, so it's pretty compressed. I think some people might just read over this whole. What justifies the principle of non contradiction pretty quickly. Because he says at the beginning, but you can't justify it. Inquiry has to stop somewhere. But I guess to back up, why are we even talking about the principle of non contradiction?

Well, because we're trying to talk about, you know, what is metaphysics studying? It is a study of being. Qua being. Well, what does that mean? It ends up. It is for something to be something in particular, something determinate, that ends up being very much tied to the principle of non contradiction. If Dylan is and is not a battleship, then metaphysics is just out the window, right? This is what Heraclitus and maybe Plato, in describing the phenomenal realm, were concerned about that when you're trying to at least describe the things of our experience that they just, they change too quickly.

You can't step in the same river twice as Heraclitus Cratylus apparently Said you can't even step in the same river once. And so, like the Cratylus episode where within the last year, Plato is also, or rather Socrates, as characterized by Plato, is also trying to argue that things are specific things. Right. In that case, it was about names specifically. Right. If things are not steady, if the phenomenal realm is just pure flux, then names aren't really fixed on anything. We just can't even make sense at all. And so for Plato, it was just obvious, the fact that we do talk and we do make sense, that things must be determinate.

Aristotle starts at a similar point where clearly we do talk about things, clearly we do express truth. Even if you were expressing the principle that everything is relative, truth is just relative. That itself is a statement that would be undermined by your claim of everything is relative. Or some of his opponents even claim everything is false. So Aristotle is having nothing to do with none of those. The principle of non contradiction holds things, at least while they're not changing, really are. Things are determinate things, and we can study that.

3:42 Dylan: What was the qualification you made? Things insofar as they're not changing?

3:47 Mark: Yeah. Toward the end, Aristotle said, well, maybe while something is changing, then we can't really nail down what it is exactly. But every change implies that there is something steady that is changing from and changing to, or that there's an underlying medium that the change is happening in. So change itself. The thing that Heraclitus is pointing to, the Changemeisters proves that there is actually stability underlying it.

4:12 Wes: So you jumped ahead to.

4:14 Mark: I'm just summing up what we're doing, the three questions, and you gave a

4:18 Wes: quick summary of the. Of the argument. I'm not sure where to go from there.

4:21 Mark: We can start at the beginning, or we could, as Dylan seemed to want to do, jump right in at something I said wrong and start picking at that.

4:28 Dylan: We should start at the beginning. My only comment is overall, in terms of the sweep of Gamma, being about what it is, that is the study of being and how is it unique, and then the leading to the principle, and then defense of the principle, non contradiction is exactly right. There's a ton of super interesting things to discuss about it. I think it's well worth pointing out that Aristotle, even though he thinks that the principle of non contradiction is not demonstratable, it does have to be argued for. And that fact itself is also worth talking about.

5:06 Wes: Yeah. It can be shown elenctically, the way he puts it, which is we can show the opponent. You know, one might say it's Kind

5:14 Dylan: of dialectic, but a kind of refutation. Yeah.

5:17 Wes: It has consequences which they're unwilling to accept. And Marcus already described. The primary consequence which Aristotle's claim and what he argues for, and it's actually a very difficult and sophisticated argument, but is that if the law of non contradiction does not hold, then there is no determinant, external mind, independent reality, determinant in and of itself. And if that's not the case, then we can't signify anything. Signification and meaning fail and therefore thinking, being able to think and speak about anything fails.

5:55 Dylan: You're bringing up a really key point that I'm sure we'll spend a lot of time on, which is that Aristotle is arguing that the principle non contradictions applies to reality itself. It's not just a principle of thought, of logic that's distinct from the way in which the world is. The fact that we can even have. He sits prior to, prior to logic. The fact that there is a mind independent reality that has features, the law

6:29 Wes: of non contradiction kind of bifurcates into two domains of applicability. One is with regard to the appearances or the way things seem to us. And then one is with regard to reality itself. I think. Yeah. When I first read this, before coming back to this, I was always confused. Well, how does this attempt to show a logical thing even belong in metaphysics? I always had that impression. But it's clear for him it's not just a logical or psychological principle, although it is both of those things too. It is about being. And it's a very important aspect of being because it's related, as both you and Mark have pointed out, to determinacy, to mind independent thinghood, mind independent substance and essence.

All those things go together. But the way this all begins is with this transition to substance as a way of describing what being is. So he wants to argue, based on puzzles that he's brought up in the previous chapter. He's asked the question, is there a science of just being qua. Being, being in general? Is there such a thing as metaphysics? Because it's not obvious. There is. It's. It's obvious. There's. To us that there's physics and biology and geometry. Yeah, more. More appropriately to his time, geometry. And that when you deal with those subjects, when you deal with a subject like geometry or arithmetic, you're dealing with things insofar as they are spatial or countable.

And so you can cash out answers to what it is to be a mathematical object in mathematical terms, like you can say a triangle Is this. Or you can say it is an essential property of triangles, that their angles add up to 180 degrees or something like that. Or as the ancients would put it, the three angles add up to two right angles.

8:19 Dylan: Right.

8:20 Wes: That's exactly how they put it. But when you get to being, it sounds odd to say there's a science of metaphysics. No one sits down to do proofs about being. It seems in the same way they would do proofs about geometry. So he has to try and say how it is that you could even study something like metaphysics. It's really interesting that he has to defend the whole possibility of the project.

8:42 Dylan: Part of that defense is in response to other thinkers. He declines to call them philosophers. In fact, he wants to claim philosopher for himself. And the others are dialecticians and sophists. They end up being the ones that are in the realm of being partisans of radical relativism or a kind of pure phenomenalism, that things are just appearances. Then all appearances can be true. Part of it is he's staking out a claim about what it is to know about the world and that the world is knowable. And this argument is fundamental to that, that there is a world out there that is knowable.

I would make one comment that sometimes when I think about this, I get stuck on the notion of, like, determinant or essence. And I think it's worth acknowledging that Aristotle isn't saying that we know everything that there is to know about the world because it is determinant, or that beings have essences. There may be plenty of things to figure out, and there may be plenty of things that we don't know. But the fact that there are makes a difference in how we think about the world.

9:55 Wes: So the way we would think of this is there are these two levels, right? And one is emergent upon the other. I think Aristotle is very, very close to this idea. In many parts of this text, H2O is the essence of water. And we expect a determinant essence at that lower level of explanation, at that lower level of the principle, which is H2O. And we expect that because we see regularity with the phenomena when it comes to the phenomenal properties of water, like clearness and all the rest under certain circumstances, and the rest we see certain regularities that we expect to be able to model, right?

That we expect to have an explanation at this other level, which is to say we expect it to have an essence. So water, as we experience it as an appearance, is not entirely determinant. We see some determinancy because we're in a world of flux and change. We also see a lot of what seems like indeterminacy. And so we might want to say the world is fundamentally indeterminate and we only know it as these phenomena and there's nothing underneath. And we, after the long history that's gone on after Aristotle, I think we have a pretty good grasp of the phenomenalist position, which is a little bit different than as Aristotle describes it.

Because I think with Kant, right, we wouldn't say, oh, all appearances are true, although there's something to that. But really we would say Kant says we can only know the appearances as opposed to the things themselves. And it's not as if all appearances are true because you have internal standards of coherence and you still have some kind of relation to the things themselves. But the determinacy of the things. It's not clear how Kant or any of the German idealists account for determinacy, because it's not clear how they account for contingency.

So it's not clear, maybe Hegel's different, but it's not clear how for Aristotle, the determinacy of the things themselves shows up in the determinacy of appearances. So we have a much more immediate grasp of the things in themselves. But that's a little preview of what's going on here.

11:58 Mark: So, Dylan, you're wondering about, or you're quibbling with my characterization of his point at the end, that it's at least possible for Aristotle. I think he's just. He doesn't claim this is the case. But even if flux deviates from thinghood, so while there are things, there's being and then there's change happening, and there's change to a being from a being, well, what's in the middle is that being too. I think that's actually really matters because, I mean, for one thing, we know that being, for Aristotle is already moving. It is being at work. So to say that there is static being and then there's change in static being doesn't really sound like something Aristotle should be saying.

12:35 Dylan: That point. Right there was exactly my point.

12:37 Mark: And logos, the way that you were just describing it, Wes, that we think that there are these scientific laws and things, there are regularities, so that all of nature, including change, right? The patterns that make change understandable are governed by the logos. And so that also seems to point to. Even when change is happening, everything is determinant. We could point at it, we can understand it. Everything is potentially understandable. Whereas I Was making maybe the more modest claim, and we can decide where Aristotle is really coming down on this, that there is at least some things, there's at least some being that is determinant.

It's just that if something is indeterminate, it just is not being, right? Then being is the study of what is being, something in particular, it is determinant. So there is metaphysics, there is being to study. The relativists, the changemeisters completely deny this. And that's all he's trying to get to. You know, that when there is being, then the principle of non contradiction will come into effect. It would be very strange, I guess, if something in flux suddenly the principle of non contradiction didn't apply to it. That would be very weird.

Like either it is in flux or it is not in flux. You could say it is in flux.

13:46 Wes: Anyway, let me elaborate on your point a little bit, Mark, because I think it's important because I think some people may get stuck on the idea, oh, he's saying there are natural kinds in essences. Is a rabbit really a natural kind? Doesn't contemporary philosophy cast some doubt on species being natural kinds and things of that sort? For Aristotle, a natural kind and essence and determinacy go together. But the crucial point is not that everything has to have an essence, just everything has to have an essence or be something dependent on an essence, a property, right, that is applicable to a thing which can only be a thing can only be described as a one, as a whole.

If it can mind independently be that in virtue of its own substance, in virtues of its own essence. So if it turns out that the only thing that has an essence are fundamental particles and fields, that's okay. Treat the rabbit as a phenomena. It, roughly speaking, has an essence for our purposes, but its regularity is reducible, possibly to some other lower layer that's not entirely workable, right? Because not everything we say in biology is reducible to statements and in physics. But ontologically I think that's the way we can think about it.

And this insight is really kind of like, for me, this is mind blowing. Especially after being corrupted by Kant for so many years. I was on the list a little bit and I saw a little bit of this in Hegel. I mean, which is that, you know, how would you ever say a category like unity is just simply a category of the mind and not part of the things in themselves? If there's one thing that Kant should have acknowledged that we can say, must be able to say about things in themselves, even to refer to them as a thing is that they are unified and that they are unified independently of anything that happens in the mind.

There must be something, whether it's God or a fundamental particle. That is what it is in virtue of its own nature. Which segues me to the very first page of Gamma 4, which is this wonderful badass statement. You know, there is a science of being qua being. And what is it the science of? It's the science of what it is that belongs to things in virtue of their own natures, which turns out to be their fundamental source or principle explanation. Cause all those things go together. There's some non accidental mind independent trait of things which makes them what they are.

16:23 Mark: It's tempting to think that being qua being is going to be entirely empty. Right? Didn't we say that in the categories you can't actually consider being qua being Right. As one of the categories? For instance, there's not a category of being. A category specifically separates substances, primary substances from attributes, from locations, from other things. But what is there to say about the universal genus? Nothing, because anything you would say about something differentiates it from something else. So how is Aristotle responding to himself here? That no, actually there is something we can say about being qua being. For instance, the principle of non contradiction based on unity.

17:10 Wes: Yeah, Mark, so you're pointing to the fact that if we were setting say roses or rabbits, we would be doing a little bit of taxonomy and saying that, okay, a rabbit is a kind of animal and here's how it's related to its nearest species. Here are the differentiae that separate it from other animals and that would be its definition. That would tell you what a rabbit is. Obviously we can't do the same thing with being because we can't put it into a higher category and we can't say what its differentiae are. You know, nothing is not a thing. We can't say it's differentiated from nothing.

And likewise, doing some internal taxonomy on it. Just enumerating all the different kinds of beings there are like changing and you know, the Routledge examples, things that change and things that don't change, we're dividing things up into elements or giving those types of explanations are not going to tell us anything about being either. We need a causal explanation to do that. We need to say something about causal relationship between different types of beings like substances and properties or attributes, which he's already given. He's given an account of that in the categories and he's already told us that substance is the subject, which is the Thing that is not predicable of anything else, or although other things are predicable of it.

So we get this rough distinction between not rough, but we get a distinction between basically substance and property in the categories. The difference, as we've already said in the previous episode, is that he, in the Metaphysics, is going to say that substance is essence, something he rejected in Categories because he thought essences were universals and he didn't see how universals could be substances of particular things. So he wants substance to have something to do with the particular, and he wants in the metaphysics to give being a kind of explanation in terms of substance.

So we don't do taxonomy, we don't do differentiae. We explain this internal relationship between a fundamental type of being, substance, and then other types of beings that depend on it, like accidental properties.

19:23 Dylan: I want to raise a question here because I find it a little bit confusing. I don't know how to say it anyway, other than do we end up with all that is being instances of being? Are there things that aren't beings? So, for instance, you just were talking about properties. So properties are properties, examples of being, or for instance, a law, like a law of gravity. Is that a being? Now? This is not exactly what he's talking about, but I was just trying to think of all the things that we would talk about. We would at least analogically talk about some of these things as things.

Right? There's this thing called the law of non contradiction. The law of non contradictions. That's a good one. Are those beings? It's very easy. We've been using all the examples that come from biology effectively or other kinds of categories of science or tangible things. So it goes to what is left out of the thinkable things from things

20:21 Mark: that have being, clearly properties and relations. Other things that were in the categories are also going to have being. They have derivative being from the primary beings. I would think that a law like a logos would have to be reduced to properties and relations between things that if you want to say it is really purely nominal to say that there is a law of gravity, but there is a property that all of these beings have that they fall or whatever, you know, whatever explains gravity. Hey, I just gave a causal explanation. There are four types of causes is the final cause. I mean, he's obviously, yes, using these things, even if he doesn't have the notion of scientific law specifically, that must be nominalist in some way that they can't itself say. Each of these types of four explanations not only refers to beings but the explanation itself is a being. That would be very weird.

21:15 Dylan: That's why I asked the question.

21:16 Wes: He wants to say that there aren't going to turn out to be Platonic forms for him, which means that universals aren't beings. And although that's not an uncontroversial interpretation of Aristotle, but we're going to have to run with that. Universals aren't beings. And I don't think we could say laws are beings. What we do have recourse to though is God. So we should make note of that because that's actually important. There are actually two types of primary being ultimately, or two types of substance or thing. Hood, however you want to translate Ousia.

And one of them is the particular whatever that turns out to be, possibly an ultimate particle, whatever, possibly the rabbit itself. And then the other one is God. And God we need in order to explain change, in order to have a first mover. But I think that might take care of some of this other worry about say what a status of scientific laws or something like that. But what's important is that they're not these free floating external entities. You know, as for Plato, the world of perceptible things in and of themselves or perceptible beings were not determinant in their own right.

They didn't have their form in them. They were just quasi determinant in terms of the only true determinant things which were external entities in their own realm, the forms.

22:34 Dylan: What's interesting about it is that of course we, I use the word analogically. We end up thinking about things as if they are beings and applying logic to them. And things like the principle of non contradiction to them, the ways of thinking about them, even though they're not things.

22:51 Mark: You're making me rethink this. I can't remember which philosopher said anything that you can put under A quantifier is an entity. And metaphysics is about entities. Don't use thing if that makes it sound too substantial. And so saying, I had three ideas today and the law of non contradiction is one of those ideas. Well, the law of non contradiction is. Is itself. It is a thing. It is not a physically unified thing because it's not physical. He's willing to admit invisible intangible things. So there could be. Wes, you saying there are no Platonic ideas? Well, presumably there are ideas in God's head. Could God have a thought that starts something rolling? I think that at least the Christians who are basing their work on Aristotle would completely say those are obviously Things that can have causal power.

23:40 Wes: We're going to find out more about God in the last recording. Okay, but the way he works, right, is not to push things, but to pull things. In a sense, it's desire. It's the desire things to move towards God that moves. So he's unmoved, an unmoved mover. So he doesn't actually do any work on that. So. But I want to just say something in response to this idea that anything that goes under a quantifier is an entity. I think that's something that Aristotle would reject. So Socrates sitting down is not an entity. The way you carve up the world is not simply arbitrary.

The entity is Socrates. The entity is the cat. The entity is not the cat on the mat. In other words, you can't just randomly carve out a piece of reality and say, okay, that's my entity, because that's the conceptual scheme that I'm using. I'm a relativist. I carve things up this way, you carve them up that way. I have these special words for snow that you don't have, blah, blah, blah. Nothing depends on a conceptual scheme. I don't have a choice about what I'm going to count as an entity. And the only true entities are things with essences, things that are substances in their own right.

So Socrates, he would consider a particular thing a substance.

24:51 Mark: So the fact you can ask, is Socrates identical to the entity? Socrates sitting down doesn't mean Socrates sitting down is an entity because it does not have the unity that an entity requires.

25:02 Wes: Yeah, sitting down is not the central property. And the idea that, that when you say Socrates sitting down is the unified entity, you're suggesting that sitting down is part of what it is to be for Socrates, when it isn't. And Aristotle cashes out, if you can make anything an entity, if you can carve anything up the way you like, then the law of non contradiction does not hold.

25:23 Dylan: It's telling that we still keep coming back to examples, even of things with properties that are tangible objects that we add properties to. Socrates sitting down is not an entity. But Socrates is an entity. Right? But ideas that we have that we work with, and whether they be ideas about the physical world or ideas about. Let's talk about justice, right? Is justice a thing, an entity? And if it's not an entity, then what sort of thing is it? Now you could say it's an attribute of human interaction that we call that we're pointing to some characteristic of human interaction.

That's the kind of question that comes up to me immediately insofar as it's being qua being that that's what the investigation of science, of metaphysics is. Are there things that are excluded from that? Now that would go down the road of are there not beings and what sort of things are. So the answer to that seems, on the absolute face of it, is that Aristotle said of course not. There's no such thing as not beings.

26:28 Wes: I think, Dylan, you're pointing to the fact that naturalism has some disadvantages compared to Platonism, which is why Socrates didn't like it. How do you say what virtue is objectively? How do you give an objective ethics? Naturalism has always been not squared very well with that project. It's very useful to have a Platonic form of virtue or justice to appeal to as an objective foundation. But it's very difficult to see how we get that in Aristotle, although his virtue ethics is a clue to that. If you can talk about health and psychological states.

27:00 Dylan: But I guess that's just the tiny answer is we talk about virtue is a good one, is there isn't a thing of virtue that things become virtuous as an attribute in the way they're being. But virtue itself isn't the thing and

27:14 Wes: there's teleology and functioning.

27:16 Mark: Attributes are things though, right? They're not substances, they're not primary entities, but they are among the entities which metaphysics looks at. I remember he brought up the example toward the end that even if it's the case that something changes over time from green to red or whatever, still when you're contemplating the greenness, the greenness is green, just like Socrates, sitting is not a legitimate entity. You might say that, you know, green circle is not an entity because greenness and circularity are separate entities. So we don't want to keep only actual substances that have essences. Those are the only entities, no attributes, presumably relations can also have essences because green really is green, not because there's a Platonic form of green out there, but there still is something that is to be green.

28:09 Wes: Substances are the only primary entities, the only forms of primary being, right? So things with essences, which turns out to be particular substances and particulars are the primary. So this we're still on page one, still on the first page of this. But this is what he means by talking about right. Being is said in many ways. We have things, we have substances, and then we have properties. The properties are not free floating. They can't just exist off by themselves. They always have to be attached to a substance. So they have this kind of dependent being, which is why I think Dylan's question is really good.

Well, that's a weird thing to say. Are they quasi entities? Are they real? You know, if they're entirely dependent on this other type of being, what are we saying about them? Are they actually entities in their own right? So those. I think those are very complicated metaphysical questions that he doesn't get to. But what he does want to say is that if we want to say what being is, we have to say it's pros hen or it's in virtue of some focal point, some primary sense of being, which is again, substance. It's the particular. And then everything else is kind of said in relation to that.

And his example is health. Right. So health, there's one primary meaning to health, which is a certain state of the organism, let's say. And then if we say a medicine is healthy or your rosy cheeks are healthy, we mean those things in a different way, but in a way that makes reference back to the state of the organism. So rosy cheeks are a sign of health, Medicine is a cause of health, and being works the same way. So the primary thing is the substance. And then properties or anything else we want to say. He's going to say affections, processes, destructions, privations, blah, blah, blah.

Those are all relative to this primary sense of substance. You need substance first to have all the rest of it.

30:07 Mark: Well, don't say relative, say related. Does this.

30:10 Wes: Well, he says relative to. It's called. It's pros ti in the Greek. They are relative.

30:15 Dylan: Yeah. Can I just read the beginning of chapter two? So being is meant in more than one way, but pointing toward one meaning in some one nature, rather than ambiguously, Just as every healthful thing points towards health, one thing by protecting it, another by producing it, another by being a sign of health, another because it is receptive of it. And also, what is medical points towards the medical art. And so too is being meant in more than one way, but all of them pointing towards one source. For some things are called beings because they are independent things, other because they are attributes of independent things, others because they are ways into thinghood or destructions or deprivations or qualities of thinghood, or are productive or generative of independent things, or of things spoken in relation to independent things, or negations of any of these, or of thinghood, on account of which we even say that non being is being, just as there is one kind of knowledge of healthful things.

This is similarly the case with all Other things as well.

31:13 Mark: I'm going to go back and say, yes, anything that fits under a quantifier is a being, but not a primary being.

31:19 Dylan: It sounds like that.

31:20 Mark: And, and the thing, even though it seemed like anything fits under a quantifier, that's just everything. You can't say anything about everything. Well, there's a paradigm case of everything, which is the, you know, that has the most being. Everything is equal, but some things are more equal than others, you know, so the primary substances and then. But everything, laws of nature, all the stuff still has being, but only as it's saying here in relation to primary.

31:42 Wes: We say under the quantifier there exists an X such that X is F. F does not go under the quantifier.

31:50 Mark: It can, can't it? I mean, I guess it depends on whose logic you're talking about.

31:54 Wes: I don't think we put properties under quantifiers. We need independent beings under the quantifiers. We need to say this is an independent being. But I mean, there are arguments, of course. I don't want to get into all this stuff about, you know, contemporary metaphysics where there are these property tropes, right? There's the universal red and then there's a particular bit of red that's in the thing and all that.

32:12 Mark: If X is the property of being red, then, you know, what the F do you mean?

32:17 Dylan: That's what I want to know.

32:19 Wes: Could X be a particular trope? Right. The particular property instantiated in the object. Let's not. Let's not talk about that. I stipulate that we ought to not

32:28 Mark: talk about all these things are beings, just not primary beings.

32:32 Wes: I think some of them are independent and particular things and others are not.

32:36 Mark: Yep.

32:37 Wes: Things per se. Right. Thinghood is Sachs's translation of ousia. That's why I think we got to reserve the word thing for these independent beings and not say we can call properties entities, but I don't think we want to call them things. Just to be clear, you know, Dylan, as he ended up there with. It's important to keep this in mind. He's still arguing that there's one science. This is the overarching goal of this section. Yes.

32:58 Dylan: Yep.

32:58 Wes: And one might worry there isn't really one science of being if there are all these different. If it's set in many ways, it could be that the word to be is just ambiguous in the way that the Routledge example is that bank is ambiguous. It's a place where you get money or it's a riverbank. And that kind of ambiguity. You wouldn't say there's the same science of those two things or same type of knowledge because they don't refer back to one essence. But he wants to say all these ways of being are actually going to refer back to one essence, which is to say this having, of this being a substance.

So there is one science, and it's one science not based on the way there's one science of rabbits with the differentiae and blah blah, blah. It's a weird way in which it's. It's this pros hen way of being a science. It's got a focal point in substance. We can explain everything through primary being. Therefore there's a unity to this science of being. It's pretty fabulous explanation.

33:56 Mark: Heideggerian, Straussian. You probably even say bank. Well, if you look, you know, going to the bank to get money is like going to the river to get fish. And there's a primary sort of meaning. But we're getting back into the silliness of the Cratylus if we take that route.

34:12 Wes: Yeah, you could start doing psychoanalytic interpretations. The fact that he's really ultimately addressing relativism here makes this highly relevant too. It's a debate that still goes on today. Right. Lots of people would like essentialism is a. Is a bad word. So Aristotle is going to argue here for essentialism. And I think he's right.

34:33 Dylan: It is something fun always to see that the arguments that are going on in whatever it is, 380 BCE are in important ways the same ones. You know, Heraclitus Protagoras.

34:46 Wes: It's Derrida versus Searle. I think they had a big fight in the New York Review of Books at one point. But yeah, it's continental versus analytic man. But the next part of this, he's going to say that there's this important relationship between being and unity. So this is on page. Are we in section two yet?

35:05 Mark: Yep.

35:05 Wes: Yes, we are in section two. It's really like the second page in my translation. This is something really important to emphasize, which is that to say something isn't independent being a thing. You have to be able to say it is unity, mind, independently. So the thing that Socrates seated has going against it is that seated is not part of the essence. It's not an essential property. It's not a reality. Unity. And the same thing with any other heap. We could point to, you know, this bunch of rocks over there sitting in a pile. That's not a real unity to Say something is a real unity, that is to say a being in the primary sense. We need something else.

35:46 Dylan: Well, that's a good example. A heap is a good example of an entity that is a non primary being. So you could talk about a heap and you could talk about what it is, but it's derivative. Would that be the right word? That's just dependent, I guess. Not a primary being. You get to things like tadpoles versus frogs here too. Right?

36:05 Wes: I was hoping we would talk about that.

36:09 Dylan: Tadpoles and frogs aren't different beings in the primary sense. Right. Because they are part of. They are phases or stages of one being.

36:20 Mark: If beings are individuals. So a given tadpole is not going to be identical to a.

36:25 Wes: So I'm the same person that I was when I was a tadpole. I don't know about you, Mark.

36:30 Dylan: I mean, see, that's the point right there.

36:32 Wes: We were all little tadpoles and now we're all big frogs. We are the same beings, aren't we?

36:37 Mark: I mean, so much of the principle of non contradiction is about unity at a time. And so I don't know that we've had implications so far about the unity of a thing over time in the text here.

36:50 Wes: Yeah. I mean, the unity over time has to be explained by substance. It has to be explained by the fact that the essence doesn't change even as the accidental properties are changing.

37:00 Dylan: But we don't have to go down

37:02 Wes: this right now because there are a number.

37:04 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

37:05 Wes: Trying to explain how there's identity through change.

37:07 Dylan: Yep.

37:08 Wes: Aristotle gives us a very general explanation,

37:10 Dylan: but I shouldn't have brought it up.

37:13 Wes: The whole history of philosophy is worried about. We had some of this just in our personal identity episode. Right. Just trying to do it psychologically is very difficult.

37:23 Dylan: Do we want to sort of kind of cruise to the end of chapter two to try to. We get the introduction of contraries?

37:30 Wes: Just to say, you know, finish the unity part. If you say a man as a being, you know, there's no difference between that and saying one thing. Right. To say thing is one thing and unity is nothing apart from being. He'll say. And the important part here is that when something is one, it's not just one accidentally, it's not just one because it ended up in a heap together, for instance. Or it's not just one because I carved it out that way because I'm wearing a beret and I'm fancy and I say I can carve things out in the way I want. It's one in Virtue of the. Its own nature in virtue of its own essence. Very, very critical.

38:06 Dylan: Yeah, you reminded me of. I think it was in the Routledge they said was. His name's Vasilis.

38:11 Wes: I think his last name is Politis.

38:13 Dylan: What's at the core here is individuation, right? So how things are individually, themselves.

38:21 Wes: How can we say anything as an individual? Again, this whole concept of unity and the thing I was talking about with Kant, you got to be crazy to say that unity is just a category in the mind. Some things have to be unities, at least at some level, mind independently.

38:35 Mark: I had a note here just saying that thinghood is prior to being a number or being fire or being a line, which would make it seem like, I think we had thought it here, that to be a thing is to be a distinctive thing. So it's not that being a thing is prior to being a particular thing. It is one and the same. So I'm trying to find the quote where I got that note 1004B, page 56. Since these things are attributes of oneness as oneness and of being as being in their own right, but not insofar as things are numbers or lines or fire, it is clear that it belongs to that kind of knowledge and to know what they are as well as the attributes of them.

39:15 Wes: What he's saying here is that the particular sciences would study things insofar as. Right. Arithmetic would do being qua number. Physics or geometry would do being qua lines. You know, it's a simplified way of putting it, being qua spatiality. Physics might do being qua fire and all the other elements, if you're that type of physicist.

39:40 Dylan: Biology is a study of living beings, kinetics, the study of beings in motion.

39:45 Wes: Yeah, but when you do being qua being, you're not doing it, of course, in terms of any of those types of properties. You're simply talking about substance.

39:54 Mark: So this is a statement about knowledge. Its thinghood is logically prior maybe to being a particular thing. But that's not to say that metaphysically something can be a thing without being a particular kind of thing. Like that is what being a thing is, is to be a particular kind of thing. Metaphysically, they come in at one in the same spot. It's just that as far as the science is, we pick them apart so that the philosophers get being qua being and the specialists get these more specific natures.

40:22 Wes: And in particular, you know, we're thinking about these relationships between the different types of beings, between accidents and substances. For Any, for instance, in the previous part of this, he said that, you know, there are many senses in which the things can said to be one, but they're all referred back to the unity of. Of substance. All things which are called one are referred to the primary one, the primary one being the substance, and must be explained in reference to what is primary. Right. So same way the health had to be explained in terms of reference to what is primary.

In other words, we're not just thinking about substances, but we're thinking about the relationships of accidents to substances and how substance has priority and how unity is constituted. In particular, we're thinking about what confers oneness. Right. As opposed to oddness, say in arithmetic, a property relevant to a specific science.

41:12 Mark: We should at least very briefly repeat the point from Plato's sophist that how can a negation be a being? I mean, we already said, well, it's relative, it's related to a being. But the way that is related is because an absence of something is just always, according to Plato, what Aristotle's running with Plato in the. In the dialogue, the Sophist, he says it's just by contrast. So when I have my glass and I say it is empty, it has a lack of water in it. It's not that there's a literal nothing in it. I mean, there's air, there's other things. It's just there's something other than water in it. So it's a contrast. So pointing out a privation is just pointing out a difference, which you're still saying something about B. You can't actually speak a pure negation. Does that seem like an accurate.

42:00 Wes: Let's just distinguish negation and privation real quick because they're two different things. For Aristotle. Negation is just not having a property. Right. But privation is not having a property that you would expect something to have because of its essence.

42:13 Dylan: So like a human being not having an arm.

42:17 Wes: Yep, exactly. So, Dylan, you were wanting to talk about the contraries and stuff. This to me is like one of the most confusing parts. It's like he's worried about saying, oh, the contraries and negations and all this stuff, this falls under our science as well. And they're reducible to being and non being. I guess maybe that's the bigger point, but I mean, they're reducible to being. Ultimately.

42:38 Dylan: The reason I thought he was concerned about it is that that comes after his discussion about what the job of a philosopher is and how that that study of being is properly the study of that's what you're doing when you're doing philosophy. In contrast to what those who engage, you know, dialecticians and sophists, they seem to appear as philosophers. And that the work that sophists and dialecticians are engaged in is engaged in sort of a back and forth between contraries. They basically get themselves confused. And so that we're going to resolve this. Another reason why I think contraries comes up here is because then it becomes related to the way you resolve. It has to do with the principle of non contradiction. And the study of being resolves what you mean by those things.

43:25 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. He'll say sophists are basically bullshit artists. Dialecticians don't make any positive knowledge claims. They're purely critical. So that kind of bolsters your point a little bit about the idea that ultimately we have to make positive claims to make negative claims. And ultimately we have to be talking about being. If we're talking about contraries and negations and all the rest of it, yeah,

43:47 Dylan: all of it ends up falling under properly the work of the philosopher to be studying metaphysics.

43:54 Mark: It is peculiar that Aristotle would say, and this is the quote, top of page 57, almost everyone agrees that beings and thinghood are put together out of contraries. At least they all say that the sources are contrary, since some say that they are the odd of the even others, the hot and the cold, others the limit and the unlimited, and others friendship and strife. And all the other things obviously lead us back to oneness and manyness. For let the derivation be granted by us, while the sources received from the other thinkers also fall wholly within these classes.

So I can see how he'd say, even if, as we were just saying, Wes, you talk about contraries, you're not really talking about being and non being. The non being still refers back to being. This is why I thought bringing up the whole sophist thing was relevant here. But I don't think Aristotle agrees. At least nothing he said makes me think that he should agree with the claims that everything actually does at its root have contraries working together, and they're the things that are causing the primary motions. Like there's nothing in our last podcast on these other thinkers who brought up these things like Parmenides that made me think that Aristotle agreed with them.

They're giving partial, you know, better than just saying everything is fire, but still not enough.

45:06 Dylan: Well, we'll just read the last sentence of that section because he set up this question about contraries that you just Read Mark. But notwithstanding that oneness is meant in more than one way, the other ways will be mented to point toward the primary meaning, as will. Similarly, the contrary is, even if being or oneness is not a universal, that is the same in every instance, nor anything separate, as presumably they're not, but rather some meanings of them point towards a single one, while others are in a series, successively derived.

45:37 Wes: Let me give a defense of contraries, because there's a good intuition behind contraries, behind the idea that the ultimate foundations of being rest on contraries. If we look at physics, for instance, contemporary physics, we need attractive and repulsive forces. Speaking very broadly, if everything is just an attractive force, everything collapses. If everything is a repulsive force, everything scatters away. We need something that puts things into relation to each other, but keeps it as a stable form. So just to take the simplistic idea of what an atom is, you know, if it's something.

If we were to think of it as something like a solar system and a electron revolving, going around, or electrons going around a center, we need something that explains why they don't simply fall into the center on analogy, right? To inertia. Something that explains why they're going around it on an analogy to centripetal force. I think for Aristotle, this reduction to these contraries. I think it's ends up being for him cashed out in terms of the contrast between substance and accident. That, in a way, is his fundamental. It's not the same thing as contraries, but that's a fundamental distinction at the bottom of things.

So that's what he's replacing it with.

46:54 Dylan: Your example about contraries makes me think that it's fundamentally related to the fact that there's motion at all. So the examples that you gave mean that the fact that. I'll call it emotion in the Aristotelian sense of just change, that the fact of change motivates the notion of contraries, because contraries would be in some important way the source of change. I say it tentatively because I wonder whether or not motion is a derivative thing or a fundamental thing, a primary thing.

47:25 Wes: Contraries are all supposed to give us identity through change. That was the point of my Adam example. They explain change, but they also explain identity through change. But the contrary allows things to continue to have a form even if they're in motion. And I think the Presocratics, in a way, are onto that idea as well. When you're talking about love and strife, for instance. Right? That's just the attractive, repulsive thing. That I was describing. But even the infinite finite and the infinite and the odd and even, all those are kind of based on the same fundamental idea. Aristotle is obviously going a bit of a different route.

47:57 Mark: All right, you're trying to get the last word in, and you got to say something fucking controversial that I want to argue about because this is making me think of in Plato's Phaedo, where he talks about it sort of as it's conventional wisdom. Everybody knows that opposites follow from opposites. We're like, why would anybody think that? But apparently that was what was floating around. So this was an argument. Life must come from death, death must come from life, blah, blah, blah. Therefore the soul must go on. But then he also argues later that the soul can't die because the soul is like the evenness of an even number.

That if it becomes odd, it's not that there's a continuity through change, it's that it actually switches to something else so that the soul, life, could not admit death. So the fact that life, death, life, death, that this pattern is in nature doesn't show continuity. It could also show that one thing pushes another out of the way. Love and strife are not, are actually opposites. It's not that there's a continuum on which love and strife operate. It's that one pushes the other out of the way. So I, I'm just.

48:57 Wes: No, no, no, no, I, I. Aristotle himself said, why did they need strife? Right? They started with love, but they need strife in order to. Not everything have everything collapse. You think about what the Presocratic philosophers are trying to do. They are, in some weird way, trying to explain unity. But that's a, you know, it's not essential to our discussion.

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