Abstract

We argue that hypokeimenon is a term of great significance for understanding Aristotle's doctrine of language and ontology of nature. There is little doubt that the term functions in an equivocal manner: it bears several fundamental senses and takes on a pervasive character of technical and central import. In the context of his doctrine of language the term stands for the logico-grammatical subject, the subject as underlyer of predication , and often for species and genus. In the service of ontology of nature, it stands for the existent as subject of change, the continuant subject through change, the material underlyer of particular existents as well as the principle of underlyer understood to be a necessary cause of existents in general. The problem is that Aristotle does not devote any chapter or even lengthy passage to a treatment of this key term except in incidental ways in relation to his other technical terms. This absence of a detailed and concentrated treatment of the concept behind the term hypokeimenon is striking. Scholars recent and past have addressed differing aspects of the meanings, however our position holds that this scholarship has been too limited in scope. While we do not oppose these inquiries wholesale, we have found them restrictive in focus and thus have undertaken a sustained study based on Aristotle's own inquiry into the then-dominant positions held by his predecessors and contemporaries. Through detailed textual analysis we work through Aristotle's dialectical method for identifying and isolating the then-current problems of accounting for ways of being and ways of speaking about these ways. We argue that by focussing on the function of hypokeimenon in these accounts Aristotle develops a systematic philosophy we have come to know as his doctrine of categories, causes and principles of existence and understanding. But, as we finally argue, a critically significant aspect of his doctrine derives from understanding Aristotle's analysis of the incompleteness or shortcomings of others' positions on the basis of which he discovers the interdependence and interrelatedness of the term's meanings. This discovery supports its several-fold functions as subject of discourse capable of bearing truth and falsity, subject of change, of becoming and as material cause having, again, several-fold significances for his science of nature