Journal of the History of Philosophy

Aristotle and the Copula RIEK VAN BRENNEKOM'~ 1. ARISTOTLE CAN FORMULATEthe difference between an existential statement and a statement involving the copula. Existential dvtxt (being) is called by him dvctt 6_~)~5g (simpliciter). Thus, e.g., at An. Post. 89 b35, concerning existential statements of the type ~oxt ~vxetvOog: x6 6' d ~oxtv ~ Ix/Idt~r~g h~,t0, dtkk' ofix e~ kev~Sg ~ ~t~. Yet it seems that this distinction, capital to our mind, was not considered of central importance by him, since it does not figure in the section on dvctL (6v) in his "philosophical lexicon" (Met. A 7). The two main senses of the verb listed there are x6 xa~' ca3x6 6v (per-sebeing ) and x6 xa'r6t ov~13el~VlX6g6v (coincidental being). It has notoriously proved difficult to relate these to our copulative-existential dichotomy. Apelt ~defended the view that in Aristotle's discussions of the various senses of e/vct~ it is invariably the copula, never the verb of existence which is dissected. At the other end of the scale, Kirwan~has more recently interpreted the sections on 6v xct0' ~n3x6 and 6v ×ct~t ovlxl~el~lX6gin Metaphysics A 7 as an analysis, ultimately, of various uses of existential dv~tL. But precisely these texts abound with copulative illustrations, for which Kirwan has no satisfactory explanation. Apelt, on the other hand, does not even attempt to integrate Aristotle's views on existence into his analysis. A more radical solution of this problem, which is the theme of the present paper, has been hinted at by M. Furth, in an admirably sharp-witted paper on Parmenides' ontology,s He introduces the nodon of afused concept of being, which he explains as follows: "... a Greek inquiry ~ xb 6v, 'what is being?', frequently must be interpreted as concerned simultaneously [my italics ] with the concepts of being = existence and of being F for variable F. To approach a Greek thinker, even as late as Aristode, without keeping this in ~O. Apelt, Beitritgezur GeschichtederPhilosophic(Leipzig:Teubner, ~891), 1o3-~ ~6. " Christopher Kirwan,Aristotle'sMetaphysicsBooksF, A, E (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, ~97~), ~4o-46. 3 "Elementsof EleaticOntology",Journal of theHistoryofPhilosophy6 (~968): ~t ~-32. [1] 2 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 24:1 JANUARY 1986 mind is to risk serious misunderstanding of his concerns." I do not know whether Furth has since then tried to substantiate this view, 4 or even whether he would subscribe to it now. It certainly does seem a most implausible thesis at first sight, because it seems to imply that for Aristode any statement of the form "x ~oxg F" was at the same time an assertion of the existence of x; and, worse still, that x's not being F entails x's not-being, i.e. nonexistence. It is just possible that Parmenides built his argument for the One in part on this confusion, although Furth himself has demonstrated that he did not need a fused notion of being in order to establish his main theses. In any case, Parmenides' arguments, which uninhibitedly play upon a confusion between copulative and existential e~vtxt, have a definitely sophistical ring. Plato instinctively tends to avoid such arguments, as far as I can see, even though he does not have the terminological apparatus to set apart an existential use from other uses of the verb e]vct~. ~ Aristode not only has the terminology, as we have seen, but also repeatedly warns against indiscriminate inferences of 'x is' from 'x is F', as in Soph. El. 167 alff. It does not follow, ~A~6 g?l 6v ~oz~ 5o~toz6v, 6z~ ~ ~?1 6v ~ox~v. o6 y~z~ ~ct~ "~ ~vcg ~ ~ xcd ~vct~ fi0t~g (cf. also 18o as~,ff., De Int. 21 a25ff.). 6 Nevertheless, it is the purpose of this paper to show that Furth's thesis is correct, and that the dreaded consequences it seems to imply are not in fact implied by it. When 'x is F' states a coincidental fact (as, e.g., in 'Socrates is white'), the predicate 'is F', and, ex hypothesi, also the predication of existence contained therein, is not direcdy predicated of x, but only coincidentally, xct~t o'ubt~e...