Volume 9, Issue 17/18, April/November 2001
António Pedro Mesquita
Pages 103-149
O Problema da Definição do Acidente em Aristóteles
The present article aims to clear up three different, though connected, questions: 1st. The significance of the double definition of ‘accident’ in the Topics. 2nd. The significance of the distinction be tween two types of accident (‘strict’ accident and per se accident) in the Posterior Analytics and in the Metaphysics, namely in its alleged relationship with the double definition of ‘accident’ in the Topics. 3rd. The meaning of per se accidents within the framework of the predicables, namely from the point of view of its putative identification with propria predicates. In the course of the analysis, the answers given to these three questions are the following (in inverse order to their presentation): 1. By definition, the same predicate can never be a per se accident and a proprium, except incidentally, namely when regarded ‘at a certain moment’ (pote) or ‘in relation to something else’ (pros ti). In fact, despite Aristotle’s silence about the status of per se accidents within the framework of the predicables, they have there its own peculiar logical location, namely under the first definition of ‘accident’. 2. The distinction between ‘strict’ accident and per se accident, on the one hand, and the double definition of ‘accident’, on the other, do not coalesce, though they partially overlap. The second definition of ‘accident’ in the Topics subsumes only ‘strict ’ accidents, while the first definition is generally valid for ‘strict’ accidents and per se accidents. 3. As far as an educated guess can go on historical matters, we can suppose that the second definition of ‘accident’ was conceived by Aristotle to cover the only kind of accidents recognised by him when writing the Topics, while, by that time, the first definition was thought merely as a alternative negative definition. However, it is the schema provided by the first definition that allows a precise technical definition of the two types of accidents, which nowhere can be found in Aristotle texts. In the final part of the article, we try to reconstruct this technical definition.