S. Marc Cohen

Plato’s Method of Division

Our main difficulty with Plato’s method of division is that we don’t know what is being divided or what it is being divided into. And until we know these things, we don’t know very much about the method of division.

Aristotle on the Principle of Non-Contradiction

Not the least among the many puzzling features of the fourth book of Aristotles Metaphysics is his discussion of the Principle of NonContradiction (hereafter PNC). Even leaving aside the obvious difficulty of determining what his arguments succeed in showing about PNC, we face the more fundamental problem of figuring out what he takes them to show. For he proceeds in such a way as to suggest that he is not always completely clear about what he is up to. Aristotle seems to be offering arguments in support of PNC. Yet to do so would be to try to demonstrate something he considers indemonstrable, to prove a first principle, to treat an ultimate explanans as also an explanandum and to try to explain it. These maneuvers fly in the face of the teachings of the Organon, which allow no room for a demonstration, or proof {apodeixis), of PNC.

Accidental Beings in Aristotle’s Ontology

Along with substances and their properties, Aristotle includes in his ontology such curious entities as the pale man, and seated Socrates,, entities he holds to be intermediate between and hence distinct from both the properties (pallor, being seated) and substances (man, Socrates) of which they are composed. These “accidental beings” or “kooky objects,” as they have been called, have been the cause of perplexity or even dismay in many of Aristotle’s readers. Following the lead of Gareth Matthews, among others, I investigate the role of accidental beings in Aristotle’s thought in hopes of making them seem a little less strange. I contend that these entities make their first appearance in Aristotle’s corpus not in the Physics, and Metaphysics, (where their presence has long been noted) but as the non-substantial particulars of the (presumably earlier) Categories,. I argue that this identification of accidental beings with non-substantial particulars helps to resolve a long-standing dispute about the nature of the particulars in the non-substance categories. Finally, I propose that the identity conditions of accidental beings suggest that they are best thought of as states or events—the particular states of (or particular events involving) particular substances. An accidental being thus owes its particularity to the particular substance with which it coincides, not to the (universal) property that is one of its constituents.