L15-01-27-14-205

1. L15-01-27-14-205 • Announcements: • First midterm (commentaries) will be distributed this week (Thursday, 1-30-14). • It will consist of 5, possibly 6 passages from Plato and Aristotle. You will need to identify all of the passages, and then write commentaries on TWO (2) of them. • If your discussion group is not functional, please let us know. For this assignment, having people to talk to will be very helpful. • If you need to talk to me, Lin, or René, we will do our best to be available. The one restriction is that you may NOT talk to us about the passages actually on the assignment. We will be grading it. • ON GRADING: This assignment, like all the others, will be graded using standard LETTER GRADES with + and -. That is, you will be given A, A-, B+, B, B-, and so on. You will, however, get specific and detailed comments. • REVISION: Since this is a “W” course, you can revise your work once it has been graded. We will not be reading drafts: do your best work and turn it in. • IF you submit a revision, we requre that changes made be changes in your argument. Tinkering with a few sentences or making cosmetic changes will not improve your grade, but will, on the contrary, result in a lower grade. Revison means literally to RE-SEE. You will get the point. Consuming your time (and ours) over trivial changes is not smart. • SUBMISSION will be covered by specific conventions for file naming (last name, first initial, a dash and the number of the assignment), manuscript preparation conventions: (See Standard Manuscript.doc on the website). • There are three graded assignments. 1/3 of each set will be read by each of us, so you will get one grade from each of us (Leroy, Lin, and René), and when the assignment is returned, it will indicate in the file name who graded it.

2. L15-01-27-14-205 • Aristotle: • The Divisions of Words. • The shift from Plato’s examples of Diaeresis (especially Sophist) is simple, but genuinely profound. Plato’s divisions, always in the same pattern (a square space, divided in half, then bisected in the other dimension, and so on) follow the formula annunciated in Phaedrus. • First, collect a dispersed plurality; • Second, divide that plurality into classes “on the joints” • The result was massive confusion and complication (see especiallly Statesman), since the end in view was to create a more or less air-tight definition. • But the result collected a diversity, and never arrived at a FORM, but only at a shaggy and baggy formula.

3. The first full scale diaeresis: The Sophist P 83 [264-8] Divine • Matter (real) • Images Human Likeness dishonest Fantastic Instruments One’s body Knowledge Ignorance

4. Redux: Diaeresis of POESIS in Sophist He is dividing the ARTS, ( TECHNE) and at 219 ff these pertain to occupations: angler, farmer, herdsman: anything done for a purpose.That one ended up in a mess. The return at 264 starts over: • Collection: ALL THINGS MADE: the results of PRODUCTIVE ART, poetikas, ποιητικός “every power is productive (poetic) (<- ν. ποιέω)which causes things to come into being which did not exist before” (Here’s the uptake of CEBES overwhelming questiong of CAUSE) 2. Divide it into DIVINE and HUMAN

5. The space of distinction • DIVINE (D) • HUMAN (H)

6. Second division: matter (real things) images D LIKENESSES H FANTASTIC Third division: Likeness (eikasia) Fantastic (phantasia) Fourth: knowing / ignorant OBJECTS----------------- IMAGES-------------------- KNOWING IGNORANT

7. LETTERS IN SOPHIST 253 (cf 261d-262e) • This pivotal example starts with the question of whether forms can “mingle” with one another, taking off from the consideration of motion and rest: [252e] Stranger And certainly one of these three must be true; either all things will mingle with one another, or none will do so, or some will and others will not. Theaetetus:Of course. Stranger: And certainly the first two were found to be impossible. Theaetetus :Yes. Stranger:Then everybody who wishes to answer correctly will adopt the remaining one of the three possibilities. Theaetetus:Precisely. Stranger:Now since some things will commingle and others will not, [253a] they are in much the same condition as the letters of the alphabet; for some of these do not fit each other, and others do. Theaetetus:Of course. Stranger:And the vowels, to a greater degree than the others, run through them all as a bond, so that without one of the vowels the other letters cannot be joined one to another. Theaetetus:Certainly. Stranger:Now does everybody know which letters can join with which others? Or does he who is to join them properly have need of art? Theaetetus:He has need of art. Stranger:What art? Theaetetus:The art of grammar. ARISTOTLE: IT’S NOT GRAMMAR, BUT AN ALTOGETHER NEW ART: LOGIC side note: Just after,[253c] Plato goes to biology, and invokes the name PHILOSOPHER, not Dialectician, and partly anticipates Aristotle on TRUTH requiring a SENTENCE.

8. What’s wrong with this? The first problem lies in what is collected together. In each art or TECHNE (τεχνη), one finds an ordered assortment of skills, including the use of tools, materials, etc. , but not a unitary thing. A new problem. Can an art be a FORM? Plato has all the piece, but cannot solve the puzzle. If one is going to get definitions, the definition is of a word. It is made of parts (the letters: grammata or στοιχεῖα (ELEMENTS! Fire, earth, air, water). Plato even recognizes that if you don’t focus on sentences, you cannot pinpoint error or articulate truth. But he’s got the wrong focus, not be exact enough with what sentences actually do.

9. The categories • First, recognize that a word may take you in multiple directions: Ask what is this? (showing a picture of a Callicles): an animal • pointing to Callicles): an animal • Both a man and a picture can be called “animal” • The core problem, which Plato never did sort out entirely, is how can you develop a definition of being? • WHAT IS THIS? • Aristotle does not go after it like Plato in Statesman (animals that live in herds, have horns or not, number of legs, when his purpose is to define “Statesman”). • It’s the classification of grammatical functions & then the combination of words. (Wait for the letters)

10. “Said of” and “IN” Aristotle is looking at the properties of particular classes of words: words that can be combined, with specific effect. If you discern them according to this distinction, you can see that you would say OF Callicles that he is a man, but you would never say that “man” is in Callicles; but if you say Callicles is white, the whiteness is in Callicles. The categories (predicaments) are predicates: There is a subject (the TOPIC), and then other words that are functionally distinct.

11. The categories per se SUBSTANCE the head word, the grammatic subject, the IT. Callicles Quantity Callicles is two footed (100 footed) Quality Callices is white, or tall or heavy (purple) Relation Callicles is taller (the size of Australia) Location Callicles is at home (is on the planet Zembar) Position Callicles is sitting (suspended 26 feet up in the air) Possession Callicles has shoes on (has horns on his head) Action Callicles is cutting (is flying) Affection Callicles is being cut (is being levitated by an angel) Substance combined with any 8 predicates makes a STATEMENT, which then can be evaluated. In parentheses above are the assertions that are false. Simple, but how hard was this to sort out? If no one had ever done it systematically, how would you figure this out? It solves two Platonic puzzles at one stroke: the technical condition of truth, and the appropriate focus for developing FORMS that pertain to things that come to be. But it also thereby opens up the pathway to connect the visible (empirical) to the intelligible, and specify a way by which one’s senses do not mislead, but can actually allow you to go, step by step to confirm some statements as true and others false. The confusion is still there (in the absence of a thorough theory of mediation) to then say, What I have said about X is TRUE, and therefore I know the TRUTH of X.

12. Aristotle’s turn for trouble: Substance • If Substance is the individual man or horse or tree, etc., the FORM as found in general nouns is definitely NOT in the individual (a point from Parmenides) (looking ahead, neither is SOUL). • Then what are we doing when we say, for example, Callicles is a MAN ? • Does MAN exist as a SUBSTANCE? Again, the Parmenides shows you exhaustively why it cannot be. • But can “Man” be said to “exist”, when there are an indefinite number of individuals all called “Men”? • Aristotle’s solution is, once again, thoroughly Platonic: “MAN” is a formula that lists all the properties necessary for X to be called a MAN. • He then calls this “Secondary Substance.” • If you have had people holding forth about the problem of “essentialism” and all the moral evil it causes, this is its start. • But first, shrink those so holding forth to the proper dimension, ask them what is “essentialism” and they will be up to the pre-frontal cortex in a contradition, one step away from an infinite regression. • The same will happen if you insist on ONE TRUE “definintion” of the meaning of a word. (See Jacques Derrida and “deconstruction” and “differAnce”, and consider the quotation from Sophist on the next slide).

13. Sophist 258e-259e • Stranger: But we have not only pointed out that things which are not exist, but we have even shown what the form or class of not-being is; for we have pointed out that the nature of the other exists and is distributed in small bits [258e] throughout all existing things in their relations to one another, and we have ventured to say that each part of the other which is contrasted with being, really is exactly not-being. • Theaetetus: And certainly, Stranger, I think that what we have said is perfectly true. • Stranger: Then let not anyone assert that we declare that not-being is the opposite of being, and hence are so rash as to say that not-being exists. For we long ago gave up speaking of any opposite of being, whether it exists or not and is capable [259a] or totally incapable of definition. But as for our present definition of not-being, a man must either refute us and show that we are wrong, or, so long as he cannot do that, he too must say, as we do, that the classes mingle with one another, and being and the other permeate all things, including each other, and the other, since it participates in being, is, by reason of this participation, yet is not that in which it participates, but other, and since it is other than being, must inevitably be not-being. [259b] But being, in turn, participates in the other and is therefore other than the rest of the classes, and since it is other than all of them, it is not each one of them or all the rest, but only itself; there is therefore no doubt that there are thousands and thousands of things which being is not, and just so all other things, both individually and collectively, in many relations are, and in many are not. • Theaetetus: True. • Stranger: And if any man has doubts about these oppositions, he must make investigations and advance better doctrines than [259c] these of ours; or if he finds pleasure in dragging words about and applying them to different things at different times, with the notion that he has invented something difficult to explain, our present argument asserts that he has taken up seriously matters which are not worth serious attention; for this process is neither clever nor difficult, whereas here now is something both difficult and beautiful. • Theaetetus :What is it? • Stranger: What I have spoken of before--the ability to let those quibbles go as of no account and to follow and refute in detail the arguments of a man who says that other is in a sense the same, or that the same is other, [259d] and to do this from that point of view and with regard for those relations which he presupposes for either of these conditions. But to show that in some sort of fashion the same is the other, and the other the same, and the great small, and the like unlike, and to take pleasure in thus always bringing forward opposites in the argument,--all that is no true refutation, but is plainly the newborn offspring of some brain that has just begun to lay hold upon the problem of realities. • Theaetetus :Exactly so.

14. This is what Aristotle sets out to do. Sort out the rest of the puzzles from Late Plato, following this extraordinary advice from the Stranger, to explore the whole of the realm of being by following the pathway of exact distinction. Note here that what Plato had treated as things (FORM, EIDOS) now become specifications of properties necessary for class inclusion. He’s one step away from the most collosal invention of the Ancient Greeks: LOGIC.