Ancient philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 1 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) 243

METAPHYSICS A quiddity, we are further told, is what is given by a deWnition This is puzzling, for surely not only per se beings have deWnitions No doubt, for Aristotle, a postman would be a per accidens being: but can we not deWne ‘postman’ as ‘man who brings the post’ (cf 1029b27)? Aristotle responds that we not always have a deWnition of X when we have a series of words equivalent to ‘X’: otherwise the whole epic would be a deWnition of the word ‘Iliad’ (F 1030a9) A deWnition must be in terms of species and genus, and only such a deWnition will generate a quiddity (F 1030a12) Accidents as well as substances can be deWned in this way: we can ask what ‘triangular’ means as well as asking what a horse is To allow for this Aristotle is willing to soften his original strict account of deWnition ‘DeWnition’, he says, like ‘being’, ‘quiddity’, and ‘essence’, are all analogous terms: all four of them belong primarily only to substances, just as ‘health’ is predicated primarily of patients and only secondarily of medicines and instruments Secondarily, they can be applied to accidents, and thirdly even to per accidens beings (F 1030b1; 1031a9) Aristotle next asks: what is the relation between a thing and its quiddity? His answer is that they are identical: and this takes us by surprise, since a thing is surely concrete and a quiddity is surely abstract His initial justiWcation of his surprising claim is that a thing is surely the same substance as itself, and a thing’s quiddity is called its substance The Categories seems to oVer a fairly straightforward way of sorting out the mystery here: Socrates, for example, is identical with a Wrst substance, and his quiddity is his second substance But here in Metaphysics F Aristotle is looking for the answer to the question, what is really meant by ‘second substance’? In ‘Socrates is human’ what does ‘human’ signify? The Wrst answer Aristotle considers is that of Plato: it stands for a Humanity that is something distinct from Socrates Aristotle uses a variant of the Third Man argument to show that this will not If a horse was distinct from its quiddity, the horse’s quiddity would have its own distinct quiddity, and so on for ever The chapter ends with the remark, ‘It is clear then that for things that are primary and spoken of per se the thing and its essence are one and the same’ (F 1032a8) What this seems to mean is this In a sentence such as ‘Socrates is wise’ the word ‘wise’ signiWes an accident, the wisdom of Socrates, which is distinct from Socrates But in ‘Socrates is human’ the word ‘human’ does not signify anything distinct from Socrates himself We need to distinguish 220